<\/p>\n
You can also listen to this podcast on iono.fm here.<\/p>\n
JEREMY MAGGS: South Africa continues to struggle with high levels of violence and property crime, but an equally worrying part of this picture is how many cases are never actually solved.<\/p>\n
Willem Els is a senior training coordinator at the Institute for Security Studies, and he\u2019s arguing that overloaded detectives, weak investigative capacity and poor crime detection are making it simply harder to hold offenders accountable, and obviously that undermines public confidence in police.<\/p>\n
Willem, a very warm welcome to you. When we talk about low crime detection rates, what exactly are we measuring here?<\/p>\n
WILLEM ELS: If you look at the detection rate, that is how we measure all the crimes committed and then the arrests that follow, the investigation, going through court, and those people then being convicted and sentenced. That is your detection rate that we measure there. Currently in South Africa it is just above 12%.<\/p>\n
JEREMY MAGGS: How much, Willem, does that rate differ between different crimes such as murder, robbery and assault? Is it bad all the way around?<\/p>\n
WILLEM ELS: It\u2019s bad all the way around. But if you look at robberies, our detection rate is more or less 9%.<\/p>\n
JEREMY MAGGS: And what about the others?<\/p>\n
WILLEM ELS: Well, murder itself is about 10%. What happens is if it\u2019s an easy crime, if there are witnesses and there\u2019s a lot of information that can be followed, they do so, and then you get arrests.<\/p>\n
ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n
CONTINUE READING BELOW<\/p>\n
Read:<\/p>\n
SA\u2019s police are losing the war on crime
\nSending in the army to fight crime (again)<\/p>\n
The challenge is that your average detective, some of them, they receive up to 200 new case files or dockets per month to investigate, and there\u2019s just no way that they can thoroughly do that.<\/p>\n
JEREMY MAGGS: Which suggests to us that there are just simply not enough detectives, right?<\/p>\n
WILLEM ELS: Exactly. There are not enough detectives and also, your turnover there, detectives don\u2019t last, they burn out very quickly and then they have to be replaced. That\u2019s the one challenge that you have.<\/p>\n
The other challenge is, because of the high turnover rate, your experience is withering, so we don\u2019t have people with that experience who can actually [develop] and go through with serious and more complex cases.<\/p>\n
JEREMY MAGGS: Which I guess begs the question, Willem, how closely then can we link this low detection rate that you\u2019re talking about to the likelihood of someone ultimately being convicted? It would be very low, right?<\/p>\n
WILLEM ELS: Exactly and your deterrence is then very low. When you look at the incarceration of criminals, we refer to it as your tertiary deterrence, and that should actually serve as a very good deterrence.<\/p>\n
Read:<\/p>\n
SA\u2019s police are losing the war on crime
\nSAPS is drowning in unsolved dockets<\/p>\n
But the challenge that you face here is because of the protection, because of the likelihood of these people being arrested and prosecuted, the odds are on their side, so now we see with organised crime, it\u2019s easy money and low risk, and that is why it\u2019s thriving.<\/p>\n
JEREMY MAGGS: Willem, the figure that keeps going around in my head is that 200 dockets. You\u2019ve raised concerns about very heavy detective caseloads, which is by all measures, not manageable. Is that a problem that is widespread across the country or simply based on the big metros?<\/p>\n
WILLEM ELS: You\u2019ve got your more dense areas where it is a bit more severe, but in general the overload is very high. In some of the places that don\u2019t have a high crime rate, it might be less, but in general it is actually 200, and in some places it\u2019s more than 200.<\/p>\n
JEREMY MAGGS: Have you applied your mind then to what a manageable caseload for a detective is?<\/p>\n
WILLEM ELS: Once again, it depends on the complexity of the case and so on. The ideal situation is that with serious crimes, you bring together a task team, a multidisciplinary task team, where you have 10 or 15 people, sometimes depending on the specialties that you need, and they work together to solve the case and then they focus on that case.<\/p>\n
ADVERTISEMENT:<\/p>\n
CONTINUE READING BELOW<\/p>\n
That is when we see results. But unfortunately, it is not always possible in South Africa.<\/p>\n
JEREMY MAGGS: So at what point then does the workload that you\u2019re talking about start seriously compromising the quality of the investigation?<\/p>\n
WILLEM ELS: Yeah, it does, severely so. If you are a detective, every morning you get back to your office, you\u2019ve got 10 or 15 new cases or whatever, and there are no decisive leads that you can follow up.<\/p>\n
Read: SAPS crisis runs deeper than one corruption scandal<\/p>\n
You will work on it, then you will look at the next one, where you have more of a chance of success, you will follow that up. The others will just be closed and filed.<\/p>\n
JEREMY MAGGS: Willem, beyond staffing levels, which is obviously a huge problem. Are there other weaknesses in the investigative system that you\u2019ve discerned that are also adding to the problem?<\/p>\n
WILLEM ELS: Yeah, indeed. It\u2019s your resources. You have your detective branches, you have your officers who have got zero vehicles, you\u2019ve got others where I know here in Pretoria, the detectives are using their own vehicles and they are filling their own petrol just in order to do their job because there are no state vehicles available.<\/p>\n
JEREMY MAGGS: What additional resources would make the biggest difference right now, apart from vehicles?<\/p>\n
WILLEM ELS: Vehicles and of course technology, they need computers. There\u2019s one national office where I\u2019ve been informed that three officers are working on one computer, and that computer is about 20 years old.<\/p>\n
We have to invest in technology. We have to invest in the support structure for these people to do their job. Otherwise, we\u2019re not going to get there.<\/p>\n
JEREMY MAGGS: To the best of your knowledge, is any of this happening, whether it be the investment in new technology or simply recruiting more detectives? Is that happening in any way?<\/p>\n
ADVERTISEMENT:<\/p>\n
CONTINUE READING BELOW<\/p>\n
WILLEM ELS: It is happening. But the challenge is a detective doesn\u2019t become a seasoned detective the moment they leave the college or they leave the training academy. Once they\u2019ve been trained, they have to build up experience, and they have to be mentored and so on.<\/p>\n
Read: Cold cases stack up as SAPS lacks over 2 000 detectives<\/p>\n
But because of the high turnover rate, you keep on lacking experience, and your more experienced detectives, some of them get disillusioned. And of course, there are very lucrative contracts in the private sector and they end up there, depriving the police of that expertise.<\/p>\n
JEREMY MAGGS: That\u2019s a worry that we haven\u2019t even spoken about, disillusionment means that there is very low morale within the SAPS (South Africa Police Service) itself. That\u2019s even a bigger problem to turn around.<\/p>\n
WILLEM ELS: Exactly. The idea of a commander, if you put it in the perspective of a detective commander, that needs to be a very seasoned detective who can guide, who can mentor, and who can actually assist these detectives, especially the less experienced ones.<\/p>\n
But now you sit with your appointments where they are a lateral increase, where people who are not really suited for that position are being promoted because of political ties or other arrangements.<\/p>\n
Read: SAPS crisis: Can Ramaphosa restore trust in law enforcement?<\/p>\n
That, of course, leads to that you don\u2019t have the mentorship, but also your detectives who are working in that office, who are actually are suitable for that promotion, are being overlooked, and then the morale is even lower.<\/p>\n
JEREMY MAGGS: William Els, thank you very much indeed, from the Institute for Security Studies.<\/p>\n
#SAs #crime #crisis #cases #detectives<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You can also listen to this podcast on iono.fm here. JEREMY MAGGS: South Africa continues…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[7163,2899,1243,20890,415],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15486"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15486\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}