PARLIAMENT has heard that almost 5,000 members of the detectives division in the South African Police Service (SAPS) have not been trained to occupy the jobs they currently do. This was revealed by SAPS senior management during a parliamentary dialogue on detective services that was convened by the portfolio committee on police in Cape Town yesterday.
Senior officials from the department of justice and constitutional development also told MPs how incompetent detectives were in dealing with investigations and gathering evidence at crime scenes.
Major-General Charles Johnson of the detective services division said while his unit had more than 23,000 detectives in its employ, more than 4,900 were not trained to do detective work. Johnson blamed the lack of training on a shortage of trainers, relevant technology and funds.
Chief director of court services in the department of justice, Pieter du Rand, said poor detective work was the main reason for low conviction rates because the SAPS often presented weak cases. He said thousands of investigators were not trained to handle basic detective work and evidence gathering.
"People come from police service backgrounds, they are not properly trained in how to deal with crime scene investigation, how to deal with the normal detective type of things ... so that justice is done," said Du Rand.
DA MP Dianne Kohler Barnard said because of the apparent poor capacity of the SAPS detectives unit, it was clear that police were "raping crime scenes". "It's the inevitable outcome of the extreme lack of training."
Acting committee chairman and ANC MP Annelize van Wyk said legislative interventions were needed to ensure proper training and promotion.
Johan Burger, a senior policing researcher from the Institute for Security Studies, said what was worrying was that detectives also seemed to be overworked. He said given the crime levels, a single detective handled a 100 investigations on average.
Source: The Sowetan
No comments:
Post a Comment