Chairperson, may I say, a shadow Minister behaves like Mr Ndlovu. Over the last 15 years, the face of the SAPS has changed significantly. The ANC has transformed the SAPS from an apartheid force that was characterised by enforcing an unjust, unequal, inhumane political system to a service that now works together with the communities it serves to protect our country and her people. We now have a service that fights crime and its dire consequences in the protection of our democracy.
Over the past 15 years - Mr George was part of that - the ANC government has demonstrated its commitment to the fight against crime by way of an ever-increasing budget aimed at strengthening and modernising this service. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the increase in the number of members in the SAPS.
But the fight is not over yet, and cannot be won by numbers alone. It requires the team working as one, focused and capably led by its political organisational leadership. As the ANC has stated in its election manifesto, it requires the commitment of the community in rooting out, within the confines of the law, those criminal elements that live amongst them.
Fighting crime is not an event, it is a process. And in the evaluation of the process we need to identify where our weaknesses are and how we improve those areas in order to intervene in the process more effectively and efficiently. The criminal act is also not an event, but a process. What we need to do is to enable the SAPS to disrupt that process at every level of execution. From this stage of planning, through proper crime intelligence, visible and proactive policing informed by crime intelligence should be able to prevent certain crimes from happening. Once a crime has been committed, we need the ability and capacity to detect and gather enough evidence so as to apprehend the perpetrators and bring them before the courts for successful conviction.
I'm dealing with two programmes, namely detective services and crime intelligence services. The detective services receive R9 billion of the R53 billion of the overall budget. That represents 17% of the budget. Detective services in this financial year received the biggest increase.
The role of the detective in the process of crime fighting is not a glamorous, one-hour quick result, as depicted in numerous detective programmes on television. Their work is painstaking and laborious. It requires a certain kind of person; a person who is a critical thinker. She or he must be able to use logic and reason to solve a problem.
A detective needs to be able to analyse and evaluate the information that they gather in order to identify a clue. A detective requires social skills and must have good comprehension and writing skills as well as oral capabilities. A detective uses brain rather than brawn to solve cases. It is thus clear that specific skills need to be present in order for a person to be an effective detective. I raise this point because as much as we must ensure that we are recruiting the right kind of person that we want as a police officer, we need to be aware of what type of individual will make a good detective.
According to information that was presented to the committee, which the Minister has alluded to already, 1 904 individuals were appointed as detectives from April 2009 until the end of January 2010. That represents an 8,9% increase and brings the total number of detectives for the same period to 23 221.
Minister, a question needs to be asked, however, as to whether this is enough and what the ideal figure should in fact be. We would request the Minister that proper research in this regard be conducted and that we arrive at a figure that can effectively serve the need and then work actively towards achieving that. This study must take into consideration the time that detectives spend in court, on the witness stand or ensuring that witnesses are present at court proceedings.
The training of detectives deserves attention. During our oversight visits we have come across numerous stations where many of the detectives have not undergone detective training. While we accept that everybody cannot be at the same level of training, we need to treat training as a valuable resource that must be managed properly.
Proper career planning and audits of the training that individual detectives received should ensure the elimination of unnecessary repetition of training, but also that we build on prior skills obtained. We also need to determine whether we are training enough detectives as specialised investigators. I believe that proper scientific study determining our ideal detective strength will indicate to us what the ratio for specialised detectives should be.
We have found that at the national level people put in place the necessary resources and instructions, but at the station level the situation is something completely different. We must remember that the public's perception of crime is determined by its own and personal experience at a station level. During a presentation to Parliament it was said that an average detective carries between 80 and 100 dockets. With the additional appointments it is estimated that the figure should go down to 50 per investigator.
However, practically, at the stations we find a different picture. Here one would often find that in one station one detective will be carrying 150 to 200 dockets while another at the same station will be busy with 30 to 40 dockets.
This indicates a lack of proper management by the detective branch commander at that specific station.