DA; SAPS mismanaged
November 25 2012 at 02:19pm
By SAPA
Independent
Newspapers
National
Police Commissioner General Bheki Cele. Picture: Dumisani Sibeko.
The SA Police
Service is mismanaged by a “top-heavy, frequently inexperienced hierarchy”
created by disgraced former police commissioner Bheki Cele, the Democratic
Alliance said on Sunday.
“The ANC has
made no change to its disastrous system of parachuting unqualified non-SAPS
members into the position of national police commissioner, even after one was
jailed and the other dismissed in disgrace,” DA MP Dianne Kohler-Barnard said
at the party's federal congress in Boksburg.
“This has led
to a collapse of the public trust in the SAPS as a whole...”
She said
shortages of police equipment and vehicles were the outcome of multi-million
rand “parties” held time and again “under the current minister”.
Kohler-Barnard
said the lack of policy creation by Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa was the root
of the operational problems.
This coupled
with the “re-militarisation” of police and the lack of public order policing
led to the death of 34 miners in Marikana
in August, she
said.
The DA resolved
to continue pushing for the removal of Mthethwa, “whose reign has been so
utterly ineffective”.
The party
resolved to continue fighting for the appointment of a career police officer as
national police commissioner.
All DA members
were urged to report police corruption and ineptitude when it is brought to
their attention.
With regards to
crime statistics, the party resolved to ask that farm murder statistics be
reintroduced in the SAPS annual report.
Kohler-Barnard
said South Africans working on farms were being murdered at an unprecedented
rate.
“Despite
becoming increasingly brutal, and with no real motive, murders on farms are not
treated as priority crimes,” she said.
“Murders of ANC
politicians are treated as priority murders.”
The DA further
resolved to ask national police commissioner Riah Phiyega to make true her
statements that specialised rural protection units be introduced. - Sapa
