Here’s how many Saps detectives received specialist training in the last year

The South African Police Service has been slow in training detectives in key investigative areas, the office of the Minister of Police has revealed. Stats also showed that 30% of detective posts at the stations with the highest crime rates were vacant as of the end of February. The figures were disclosed by the department in a recent response to a written parliamentary question and focused on the 35 stations most featured in Saps’ quarterly crime statistics charts.

Among those stations were 15 in Gauteng, eight in the Western Cape, seven in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), two in Limpopo and one each from Mpumalanga, North West and Eastern Cape. The South African National Defence Force (SANDF) was deployed to assist in March, with those close to the situation questioning the army’s effectiveness if crimes could not be properly investigated. Chair of two parliamentary committees on defence and police Ian Cameron asked about the detective compliment within Saps, specifically at hotspot stations.

The minister said that police had 3 496 detective posts at the 35 stations listed, with 2 480 of those positions being occupied as of 28 February. Stations with the highest vacancy rates included Inanda, Pheonix, Cape Town Central and Kraaifontein, with the minister limiting the figures provided. “Please note that Saps cannot disclose the actual number of resources that are deployed operationally, particularly at police stations, as this may reveal vulnerabilities, which may place Saps members, police stations and Saps operations at risk,” the minister wrote.

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Jeppe, the station in Gauteng with the highest number of murders had 64 detectives, while its KZN counterpart, Inanda, had 52. The Western Cape had the two stations with the highest number of murders in the last reported quarter – Mfuleni and Nyanga – with 77 and 84 detectives per station, respectively. These four stations with 277 detectives had 727 murder cases opened between them from 1 April and 31 December last year.

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