The South African Police Service (SAPS) is on a drive to recruit former officers to beef up its detective services, which have been left depleted by mass resignations resulting from low pay, lack of resources and the high rate of police killings.
The police service has advertised 200 vacancies for the re-enlistment of former members of the SAPS who were in the ranks of constable, sergeant, and warrant officer.
The SAPS has said the placement of all successful applicants will be in the detective services, irrespective of the environment they served previously in the service.
One of the requirements is that the former officers must not be older than 55 years of age on the closing date of the advertisement on October 21.
Last year, senior SAPS management told the parliamentary portfolio committee on police that there were about 17 000 detectives responsible for investigating crimes, which has resulted in high caseloads for officers.
They further told the committee that they were facing a serious challenge with the high turnover of members of the detective services, which is caused by officers being attracted to take up jobs in other government departments or in the private sector for better pay.
Parliament also heard that the number of detectives in the SAPS had dwindled from 26 000 in 2016/17 to 17 600 last year.
Gareth Newham, head of the justice and violence prevention programme at the Institute for Security Studies, blamed the situation on poor planning.
“I think the figure stands around 8 000 detectives lacking at the moment. This is generally due to poor planning and overall [poor] human resources processes where you can track how many detectives you have and put plans in place that do not lead to these shortages,” said Newham.
Newham said the recruitment process was a temporary solution by the police to reduce the number of shortages in the skilled detective environment.
“The organisation should do a skills audit to maintain a certain level of capability. What they seem to be doing is waiting until there is a crisis and doing these mass recruitments, which will include new, lowly skilled constables.
“This does not help with the kind of skills they need to deal with proper, serious, violent organised crime like mass killings in the Eastern Cape, extortions and kidnappings.
“You need skilled detectives, investigators and intelligence operatives. That takes many years to develop, and they have not been developing that.
“This is more of a stopgap measure to reduce the total number of shortages in the skilled detective environment,” said Newham.
Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union spokesperson Richard Mamabolo said detectives carried a huge workload, which led to resignations.
“So, it [the recruitment drive] is one of the measures to address the shortages therein,” said Mamabolo.
He said detectives play a crucial role in gathering evidence, and it is the kind of work that requires them to move from place to place, yet without sufficient resources in most cases.
“We have been complaining about the SAPS brain drain and its impact on resolving cases, so this is a good move, and if we are to retain this skill, numerous benefits like salaries, and other allowances need to be improved,” said Mamabolo.
South African Policing Union spokesperson Lesiba Thobakgale welcomed the move and said the former detectives will also assist in transferring skills to newly appointed members.
“The former police [officers] left based on various reasons, such as looking for greener pastures, and police killings, amongst other reasons,” said Thobakgale.
“Detectives play a role in investigations of crimes that have been committed. Sapu welcomes any efforts that seek to capacitate the SAPS, as we welcome the recruitment of entry-level police, which targets young people to join SAPS,” said Thobakgale.
