Chairperson, supported in this budget is a Ministry that produces crime statistics that are at best 18 months old and at worst fabricated. We do not know how many people are murdered each day, robbed each day and raped each day.
Despite this budget, civilians spend R40 billion a year on private security. Despite this budget, there were over 6 000 complaints against members of the SAPS this past year. Out of this budget, a good portion of R90 million has been spent on suspended SAPS members and R2 million for Jackie Selebi.
There are police stations that are in a pitiful state of disrepair, and we know there are SAPS members with virtually no equipment at all. Poor training, poor equipment provision, poor police stations and the enormously expensive and totally discredited 10111 call centres are also provided for by this R46 billion budget. An amount of R6 million has been spent in Gauteng alone, and the Auditor-General says 79% of the calls are abandoned. It pays for a damning R7,5 million and 400-page report that revealed the truth about the dysfunctionality of the police's legal services division. This is the same division that racked up R46 million in legal fees - twice the amount paid out in settlements.
The firearm legislation is an extremely expensive failure. The Police Ministry faces a Constitutional Court challenge while its own members lost 2 500 weapons last year. Despite this budget, there is only an 11% chance of conviction if a criminal murders someone. The forensic science laboratory has backlogs running into tens of thousands of samples.
We have SAPS members unable to write dockets correctly, 5 200 SAPS members without driving licences and over 2 500 lost dockets. An extraordinary amount of the budget money was also paid out to civilians who were abused by the police. Our land borders are undercapacitated by 71%, and this budget cuts the border budget by 3,23%.
Finally comes the news that the second largest increase goes to protection services for the so-called VIPs. Under no circumstances will the DA support this budget.