Little faith in cops
May 25 2012 at 11:35am
By Karabo Seanego
By Karabo Seanego
A police constable accused of instigating a violent protest in Barberton was granted bail on Thursday.
South Africans seem to be losing faith in police officers tasked with protecting them from the onslaught of criminals and thugs.
Residents of Ekangala are livid about the time the local police station takes to respond to their calls. A ward councillor in the area was hopping mad after community members burnt a Putco bus and made their way to the house of the Tshwane Metropolitan Council chief whip Jabu Mabona and vandalised it earlier in the week.
According to the ward councillor, the police only responded after three hours. “We called them (at about) 7pm, but they only arrived after 10pm. When they got there they told us they had a staff shortage,” said the councillor. The house in question is not even five minutes away from the police station.
He said another Putco bus was burnt during protests a month ago. He said it happened next to the police station, but no one was arrested. “We are concerned about their reaction time, because people might die as a result of their slow response. This issue has to be dealt with immediately,” he said.
The councillor said when they went to the police station, the officers were reluctant to help until one of Mabona’s bodyguards introduced himself as a member of the VIP Protection Unit. “This was when they became a bit helpful and started talking to us. We called two senior members of that station, One was asleep and his wife answered the phone, but he never woke up. Another officer said he was on leave and couldn’t help us,” he said.
Police spokesman Johannes Japhta said they were looking into the matter and the station commissioner was willing to meet the complainants to address the problem. “We would like those people to come forward and supply us with more information and the names of those officers they spoke to,” said Japhta.
Actions such as those of the police officers at the Ekangala police station do not do much to encourage people to report crimes.
The South African Advertising Research Foundation (SAARF) has released figures stating that 40 percent of South Africans who fell victim to violent crimes did not report them as they did not have faith in the police. SAARF asked a sample of just more than 25 000 adults, aged from 15 years, if they had been victims of crime in 2011 and if so, if they had reported it.
SAARF CEO Dr Paul Haupt said their latest statistics showed that fewer than six out of 10 violent crime victims would see the inside of a police station. “While these figures are encouraging, there remains a significant gap between the number of people who say they have been a victim of crime and the number of people who will actually report that crime,” said Haupt.
The study found that out of the 1.8 million people who lived to tell the tale after experiencing a violent crime in 2011, 44.3 percent did not report it to the police. A total of 44.2 percent of people didn’t bother reporting non-violent crimes they had witnessed in the same period.
The head of crime and justice at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), Gareth Newham, said the issue of people not reporting violent crimes to police wasn’t unique to SA. “Across the world, there is always some degree of under-reporting which varies according to several factors. The type of community and culture influences a person whether to report or not,” said Newham.
Newham said the different types of crime also had different reporting rates. According to him, almost all car hijackings are reported while only 60 percent of house burglaries are reported, and street robberies have the lowest reporting ratio.
“Sometimes people don’t report the crimes because they feel police will not catch the perpetrators or even if they do, they will not be able to identify them. Others fear reprisals from their attackers and if the crime happened while they were walking at night, they feel embarrassed and blame themselves for walking at night,” he said.
Newham added that as much as people might be reluctant to report crimes or view them as not being serious, police were not able to plan or know which crimes were prevalent in certain areas and what action should be taken to combat them.
That was echoed by Gauteng provincial police spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Lungelo Dlamini. He said every crime, no matter how small, should be reported to the police so that they knew what crimes were on the increase and in what areas those crimes were mostly committed.
“Crimes reported become part of the official crime statistics and this helps us plan our strategies accordingly,” said Dlamini.
Newham said police should also make it easy for people to report crimes. He said one of the things that demoralised people when they went to report petty crimes, such as a stolen car stereo, was the fact that it took more than an hour to finish the paperwork.
“Government should also make information on the importance of reporting cases readily available to members of the public to encourage them to lay charges,” said Newham.
karabo.seanego@inl.co.za
