Police service facing a number of challenges: POPCRU

The Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (POPCRU) says the police service is facing a number of challenges threatening its ability to effectively fight crime.

POPCRU members have convened at the Birchwood Hotel in Kempton Park for the Central Executive Committee meeting.

The five-day gathering comes at a particularly difficult time for the police service as the Madlanga Commission lays bare serious allegations of corruption and criminality within its ranks.

POPCRU says the over 1 million hopefuls competing for 5 500 spots to become an officer highlights the unemployment crisis in the country. Spokesperson Richard Mamabolo says this is one of the challenges the union is grappling with.

“There’s a high unemployment in the country and we think that there should be some form of a multifaceted approach to us dealing with unemployment so that you do not only have such a large number of people focused on getting jobs within the police service as opposed to many other areas and that of course demonstrated that there is definitely unemployment in the country as has been related by the latest unemployment statistics.”

Mamabolo says interventions such as releasing crime statistics more frequently have not delivered the intended benefit of making it easier to track and tackle crime.

“We’ve been seeing challenges where there’s been well understaffing in police of course the numbers are continue going down yet the population keeps rising on a regular basis. Similarly, with the DCS you know we’ve got a declining staff complement while the prison population keeps going higher so it’s going to be important that as we deal with those things. We look into the capacity that they have because there is also challenges around the uneven allocation of resources. So, you might have manpower but go to any police station especially within rural areas as compared to those within affluent areas, have got all the resources yet those within townships and rural areas have got shortages of vehicles.”

Mamabolo says these challenges have created the impression that police are unresponsive to the challenges facing communities.