INDUSTRY ISSOPINION
More public order police is no easy answer for SA In the wake of the July unrest, other options are needed to ensure better handling of public violence. By David Bruce, Independent Researcher and Consultant, ISS Pretoria. From https://issafrica.org/iss-today/morepublic-order-police-is-no-easy-answer-for-south-africa?utm_source=BenchmarkEmail&utm_campaign=ISS_Today&utm_ medium=email
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he chaotic unrest in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng last month, in which over 300 people died, resulted from a conspiracy to destabilise South Africa. Although precipitated by the jailing of former president Jacob Zuma on 7 July, the plot must have been hatched well before this. Had South Africa’s intelligence system provided an adequate warning, the attacks and looting might never have become a major public order policing problem. With effective intelligence, the police could have swiftly de-escalated the situation, arresting key planners and instigators before the insurrection took hold. Public order police (POP) and other police resources might also have been deployed, in advance, to areas where they were likely to be required. Protective barriers could have been placed around possible targets. Community leaders, religious organisations, ward councillors and others might have been mobilised to discourage violence and looting. Of all the deficits in South Africa’s security system that the unrest exposed, fixing intelligence should undoubtedly be
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the government’s highest priority. But intelligence cannot always predict public disorder. The authorities need a contingency plan should intelligence prove inadequate and widespread public violence breaks out again. Calls for more public order police inevitably follow the type of crises that gripped SA in July But that may be neither possible nor desirable, given the country’s current crime context and the government’s budgetary constraints. The government has not provided figures on how many public order police and other law enforcement personnel were deployed during the unrest. Whatever the facts, the violence outstripped the police’s capacity to respond, leading to the 12 July deployment of soldiers to supplement police resources. In the aftermath of the 2012 Marikana massacre in which 44 people died – most at the hands of police – the South African Police Service (SAPS) laid out ambitious proposals to expand and equip public order policing units. These envisaged that by 2018, operational and support personnel
would more than double from 4,721 to 9,522, and the number of units would increase from 28 to 54. Public order numbers have indeed grown, albeit modestly. According to Police Minister Bheki Cele, in March 2021 the number stood at 6,324, a rise of 34% from 2014. And the number of units has expanded to 49. Despite these increases, police were still overwhelmed when responding to the recent unrest. The SAPS should develop a better auxiliary public order policing model For those who believe that South Africa should invest in more public order police, this is a most inconvenient time to do so. Faced with severe fiscal constraints, the government is cutting the budgets of many departments, including the SAPS. Since March 2014, when SAPS employed 194,852 people, personnel numbers have declined by 7%. They are set to drop by a further 10% from the current 181,344 to 162,945 in 2023/24. Of these, roughly 130,000 will be police officers, with the balance being administrative or other
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