Cape Town – The South African Police Service (SAPS) has announced bold plans to arrest police killings, following concerns that the men and women in blue continue to die in the line of duty.
Briefing the parliamentary committee tasked with providing oversight over police on Friday, Deputy National Commissioner for policing Lieutenant-General John Sithole said police were implementing tactical and community-level plans in a bid to curb the killing of police officers while they were on and off duty.
The Deputy National Commissioner said the issue of police killings was an emotional one for the SAPS.
“We are faced with an era where our members leave their loved ones in the morning to go to work and some of them never return. We are also witnessing a situation where our members commit to a struggle against crime and try to ensure the safety of our communities and in the process they then sacrifice their lives.
“With the plan that we brought here today… we are also trying to express a meaning to them to say why they sacrifice their lives and die for the cause … We are looking at this matter at a tactical level but we are also escalating the issue to community level,” he said.
He said this shortly after the committee’s chairperson Francois Beukman expressed his concern that the killing of police officers had reached intolerable proportions and that any strategy intended to curb this, needed to focus more on preventative measures rather than reactive.
When opening the meeting, he said 57 men in blue have fallen so far this year.
The briefing also comes a day after Security Minister David Mahlobo condemned police killings during an imbizo with members of the community in Western Cape’s notorious Nyanga township on Thursday.
Nyanga is amongst the top 5 hotspots nationally.
Major General Susan Pienaar, the SAPS head of crime prevention in the visible policing division, said a multi-disciplinary approach will be taken to ensure synergy between the different operational environments.
“At a strategic level, we have adopted a police safety strategy. At a tactical level, there is a national police safety plan and police safety plans in each province then at operational level we have a tactical response plan in place,” she said.
The Major General said the police safety strategy is a comprehensive safety strategy that has been developed and implemented.
The plan seeks to, among other things, ensure the safety of all police members based on five pillars aimed at minimising risk of attacks and unnatural deaths.
The five pillars include:
- creating a standardised regulatory environment for police safety as a priority;
- Proactive interventions to reduce attacks and non-natural deaths of members;
- Reactive interventions to ensure arrest and conviction of offenders;
- Restoring confidence in the criminal justice system and serve as a deterrent to offenders; and
- Raising non-compliance and employee health awareness support interventions for members and families.
Revealing detailed statistics of police officers who lost their lives in the line of duty, she said there was little change in the number of police killings year in and year out.
The Major General said during the 2012/ 13 financial year, 84 police officers were killed while on or off duty, and in 2013/ 14, there were 77 members that were killed, while 86 were killed during the 2014/ 15 financial year. – SAnews.gov.za
