Police and MPs blame immigrants, unemployment, gangs, and each other for crime

Police representatives of the five most dangerous precincts in the country were grilled in parliament on Tuesday. The portfolio committee on police summoned the station commanders in what turned out to be a back-and-forth session of criticisms over who is to blame for the high violent crime rates in Hillbrow, Johannesburg Central, Kagiso, Mitchells Plain, and Nyanga.

Minister of Police Bheki Cele and commissioner of police General Khehla John Sitole also attended the hearing.

SAPS representatives delivered a presentation on the five precincts. There has been an increase in murder in all of them, with minor shifts in other categories of contact crime.

The police blamed foreign nationals, unemployment and gang activity for being the main impediments to reducing crime in the precincts.

A spokesperson for the Nyanga police station criticised the national representatives of the SAPS for pushing blame on to the station. He cited a lack of resources and no proper national review by the SAPS of the conditions under which people live for the failure to lower crime rates.

The SAPS presentation had a list called the Five Pillars, which actually listed six priorities for reducing crime: Intelligence gathering, proactive approach, combat approach, reactive-through-detection approach, community policing, communication and liaison. None of these was properly explained.

Barrage of criticism

MPs followed the presentation with questions that turned into a barrage of criticisms of the SAPS.

Committee members condemned the fact that the five precincts have held their positions as the highest violent crime rate precincts for most of recent history. By focusing on the five precincts in question, one MP argued, change in precincts with slightly lower crime, such as Umlazi, was not occuring.

MPs chastised the SAPS for failing to fight police corruption or address mediocre police performance. The committee focused on statistics showing that in some precincts many officers were not reporting for duty, whether on sick leave or for family obligations or other reasons. In Mitchells Plain, only 79% of officers were currently reporting for duty.

MP Dianne Kohler Barnard (DA) said that while there were funds allocated for informants, there was no mention at any point of informants being used. She suggested the precincts may be committing fraud.

Another MP pointed out that 76 bulletproof vests were reported missing from Johannesburg Central.

The meeting became heated when immigration was discussed. Representative Ahmed Munzoor Shaik Emam (NFP) delivered a diatribe over how some suburbs of the Western Cape are entirely occupied by foreign nationals, and how South Africa is not meant to host so many immigrants.

The response by the committee wrapped up with a long address by MP Livhuhani Mabija (ANC), who had previously kept quiet. Mabija, speaking more to the entire room of people rather than the SAPS representatives, gave an emotional plea calling for the country to be saved. She argued that the root of the issue was not a lack of performance, but self-interest and money.

“If all political parties don’t stop fighting for power,” she said, “we cannot stop the criminals. We fail to love poor people. We fail to love one another.”

Mabija defended the SAPS representatives: “We expect the poor men and women in blue to care for all this rubbish … if we don’t change the mindset of the masses, we won’t win.”

Representatives from the SAPS, with much less enthusiasm than before the questioning by the committee, responded morosely to the criticisms. They said they felt unfairly blamed for issues that were not theirs alone to address.

Cele laughed at the committee’s criticisms, claiming that the SAPS mission was impossible because “the conditions [of the precincts] will never change”.

“The SAPS mandate is overstretched and impossible to fill,” said Sitole.

Sitole argued that the true solution was not increased police enforcement, but “overall change of human life”.

The meeting then ended.

The only resolution from the meeting was that all vacancies in these five precincts be filled by December. MP Zakhele Mbele (DA) said there would be follow-up meetings next year to assess whether the resolution had been implemented.

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