Despite having less than 90 000 officers in the South African Police Service (SAPS) for law enforcement duties, Alderman JP Smith, Cape Town’s mayoral committee member for Safety and Security, claims that the Western Cape Government can fix the SAPS in the Western Cape province.
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In a Facebook post Smith made on Thursday, 14 March 2024, Smith praised the Law Enforcement Advancement Plan (LEAP) for arresting three suspects on charges of hijacking, possession of stolen property, possession of unlicensed firearm and pointing of a firearm.
In the same post, he mentioned how the shortage was created by the national government’s mismanagement of the SAPS.
‘We can fix our SAPS in our Province if the control of SAPS is instead handed over to competent Provincial and Local governments,’ Smith added.
His claims are corroborated by a statement released by the Western Cape Government on 29 January 2023, which confirmed the shortage of SAPS officers on the ground, with recruitment in the SAPS lagging behind by ‘approximately 20 years’, during 2021/2022, according to Reagan Allen, Western Cape Provincial Minister of Community Safety and Police Oversight.
‘Not only has the requirement never been met but staffing at station level has declined to such an extent that it has become clear that the national government will and cannot address police resourcing anywhere in South Africa’, according to the statement.
‘The national police-to-population ratio is one officer for every 413 residents.’
This is why the City of Cape Town and Western Cape Government used its own combined resources to ‘train up and deploy Law Enforcement Officers to the worse affected, under resourced SAPS stations’.
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Picture: Facebook / South African Police Service