On August 16 last year, I applied for a Police Clearance Certificate (PCC) at the Booysens Police Station. I was told to wait four to six weeks for it to be ready for collection.
It’s exactly five months and two days, and I still do not have it.
I have called a billion times Everyone I have spoken to at the police station say it is not their job to get or give me feedback. I went as far as emailing the secretary of the station commander as well, no service. I went as far as emailing other police stations; the SAPS complaints email is published on its website and still no assistance from anybody.
Before this application was made, I was in the process of adopting an abandoned child. I cannot go ahead with the application without the PCC for the courts, and I made this very clear to the police staff as to why I am so desperate for my certificate. A child is involved and still, no one at the Booysens Police Station could be bothered.
If they cannot assist me, and instead of telling me “to go to Pretoria myself” (yes, no further instructions, just go to Pretoria yourself) they should refund my R150 that I already paid for a document I haven’t received after five months so that I can find another agency that will assist me before I have to go through the whole adoption process again because of the incompetence of a police department.”
Pamela Billings
Booysens police communications officer Capt Lorraine van Emmerik responded:
“There are five different people at the station that are fully aware of her situation and they are trying their utmost best to sort out what’s going on.
However, we do not do PCC at the Booysens Police Station, they are done by a national fingerprint record system where they check their database and see if there’s any criminal record across the country for her.
There was something wrong with her first set of fingerprints because of the ink or something utilised while they were taken and, unfortunately, the Local Record Criminal Centre (LCRC) could not read the fingerprints.
She was then called in and another set of fingerprints was taken. We are still waiting for those fingerprints to come back from LCRC. We, unfortunately, do not have any control over factors like Covid-19 because sometimes, the office was closed because of Covid-19 and, therefore, nothing was done.
We are also still waiting at the station for her fingerprints to come back.
As soon as they are here, she will get a notification that her fingerprints have been returned to Booysens Police Station.”
