Institute for Security Studies (ISS) independent researcher David Bruce has said that the problems facing the South African Police Service (Saps) cannot only be understood at the level of the organisation. He said the focus must be on the leadership, as well as on the rank and file level, to explain the organisation’s current shortcomings.

Bruce said South African society was in a multi-faceted crisis, with one manifestation of this crisis in policing.

He explained that some of the problems in the Saps were linked to serious shortcomings and limitations of the governance system.

He noted that the failure to appoint suitably skilled leaders to senior positions in the public service, sometimes linked to ‘cadre deployment’, but also to other manipulation and abuse of appointment processes, had also compounded Saps’ problems.

This, he said, had been facilitated by a Constitutional provision that authorises the President to appoint the National Commissioner of Police.

“As has been pointed out repeatedly, virtually all of those so appointed have left under a cloud. When they were appointed some were senior police. But some have been civilians with no experience in the policing field,” Bruce explained.

He said the weaknesses in the governance, leadership and management of the Saps were reflected in the absence of coherent policy making and a programmatic approach to strengthening policing.

“The weaknesses in the governance system are not only weaknesses of capacity. There is an absence of coherence between the different role-players. The Civilian Secretariat for Police is supposed to function 'under the direction of’ the Minister. This suggests that the Civilian Secretariat should be an instrument that guides and informs the Minister in developing policy. But there is little evidence of such a relationship,” he stated.

Bruce explained that the Saps also disregarded policy prescriptions from the Secretariat, even when signed off by the Minister, adding that instead of complementing each other, it frequently seemed that the various arms of the governance system were working at cross-purposes.

DECLINING EFFECTIVENESS

Data provided by the ISS highlights evidence of declining performance by the Saps between 2012 and 2020 as well as several dysfunctional aspects of the policing system.

“The ‘crisis of policing’ is, therefore, currently partly one of decline. But, despite this evidence, it should be recognised that, over the last 20 years, Saps management have, to some degree, succeeded in maintaining the Saps as a stable bureaucratic system for delivering policing services,” he added.

However, he noted that addressing the crisis in policing was about much more than reversing this decline.

He said the challenge was how to develop a policing system that maintained certain key aspects of stability and reliability but also a system that was more responsive, more innovative and more effective. 

Emphasis must be on addressing the political, social and economic problems which underpinned high levels of crime and violence, he said.

He added that there was also a need for policing and law enforcement to address a complex and changing range of types of crime, adding that in the wake of July’s unrest there could be little doubt too that public order policing, to support peaceful protest and address the risk of disorder, also remained important.