"Currently the South African Police Service (SAPS) is in a state of crisis," Democratic Alliance spokesperson Dianne Kohler-Barnard told a media briefing at Parliament.

At present, South Africans faced one of the highest crime rates in the world, and many felt trapped inside their homes and suspicious of those in their communities.

"We cannot build a united, prosperous nation while so many feel trapped in a web of terror caused by crime," she said.

Outlining DA policy on the SAPS, Kohler-Barnard said the ANC's "disastrous cadre deployment policy", which had seen skilled security experts replaced by political appointees, was at the heart of the problem.

"This has triggered a managerial crisis in the police service, which has filtered down throughout the service to its most junior ranks."

The command structure had been left in tatters. The national police commissioner had been placed on leave, two of the five deputy commissioner posts were vacant, and at least two divisional commissioners were facing the possibility of serious criminal charges being laid against them.

In addition, one critical divisional commissioner post remained vacant.

Safety and Security Minister Nathi Mthethwa's decision to release crime statistics only on an annual basis should also be reversed.

The DA would implement a real-time crime information system, available to the public.

The disastrous SAPS record on losing firearms had to be tackled immediately.

Since 2001, 14 117 weapons had been lost or stolen from police stations, increasing by 165 percent from 943 in 2001/02 to 2507 in 2008/09.

Most of these were now on the streets in the hands of criminals. In addition to this, many thousands more weapons were lost by metro police and other local government law enforcement officials.

It was likely that between 20 000 and 25 000 police and metro weapons had been lost or stolen since 2000.

Focus on legal firearm owners

A DA government would ensure that officers were held to account when they lost weapons, Kohler-Barnard said.

The continuous increase in missing police case dockets also had to be resolved immediately.

The number of lost dockets had increased every year since 2003, and totalled over 2500 in that time period.

At present, only six percent of these incidents resulted in disciplinary procedures.

All officers should be held to account for negligence, and a new system implemented that would see dockets regularly backed up electronically.

The bottleneck in forensic science laboratories, where over 20,000 samples were currently backlogged, had a severe impact on conviction rates and needed to be resolved.

Also needing attention were the serious staffing anomalies in the police.

The size of the police service should be increased to 250,000, and the detective pool by 30,000.

Proper training had to be provided and key specialised units, such as the narcotics bureau, family violence, child protection and sexual offences units, and anti-hijacking unit, had to be reinstated, she said.

Sapa

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