Police in crisis, plus five highlights from ‘Vrye Weekblad’

It’s like a cancer.

This is how the crisis in our police service has metastasised over the past two decades to its current state of near collapse.

Let’s go back to 2002. The transition years have passed, and the ANC is firmly in charge. Thabo Mbeki is president and Jackie Selebi becomes police commissioner. Selebi is a diplomat and a politician, with no knowledge of policing.  

It was a strange appointment — someone without a scrap of operational experience becoming SA’s top cop. But there was also, of course — especially at the time — great sensitivity in ANC ranks about the part the “old police” had played in the apartheid years, and it’s possible this suspicion influenced Mbeki’s decision to appoint an ANC loyalist who was politically close to him and completely outside the system to a key post.

Selebi launched a series of dramatic interventions.

First, there was a mass recruitment campaign (amid concern about sharply rising crime).

This was a major strategic mistake, Gareth Newham of the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) believes. Selebi’s logic, he says, was that “more police equal less crime, but it is anything but that simple”.

More than 70,000 new members were added to the service within 10 years, but Newham says little attention was paid to the quality and integrity of the recruits — and to whether they had the right mindset for public service, “because in the end policing isn’t something anyone can do well. You need people with the right attitude to be law officers in communities. It requires a high level of emotional intelligence and good communication skills,” said Newham.  

“In the first place many of those recruits should never have become police officers and, second, to assimilate such a large number of recruits, the training period was shortened from two years to one. In the end, it meant station commanders had to take care of large numbers of new members with insufficient training.”

Read this damning analysis of the state of our police service plus more news and analysis in this week's issue of Vrye Weekblad.

Must-read articles in this week’s Vrye Weekblad

>> Browse the full March 26 edition

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