Not enough police for eMondlo
Poorest ratio of cops sees rise of vigilantes
● So dire is the manpower and resource shortage at the rural northern KwaZulu-Natal police station of eMondlo that the community has formed vigilante posses to deal with criminals.
The police station, situated between Vryheid and Dundee, faces the country’s second-worst staff shortage, according to SAPS human resource data obtained by the Sunday Times.
It shows that allocation of manpower strongly discriminates against poor, black communities.
eMondlo police station has 70 members for every 100,000 people compared to Pietermaritzburg police station, which has 1,844 members per 100,000 people.
In the Eastern Cape, the Flagstaff police station has 56 police officers per 100,000 residents. But the coastal hamlet of Port Alfred has 129 police officers for its 8 800 people, which translates to a ratio of 1,465 police staff per 100 000 people.
The SAPS data, which police management was reluctant to supply, according to an NGO, contains the most up-to-date figures and was obtained from legal papers submitted in an Equality Court case in Cape Town, which saw the Social Justice Coalition (SJC), Equal Education and Nyanga Community Policing Forum squaring up against the SAPS.
On December 14 2018, after a three-year legal battle, judges Nolwazi Boqwana and Mokgoatji Dolamo ruled that the way police resources were allocated discriminated against poor black people.
On August 6 the court ordered police management to provide a plan remedying the situation by September 1 to address dire police-to-citizen ratios.
For a police station to stay open day and night it requires a minimum of 54 officers. This figure emerged during the Khayelitsha commission of inquiry which looked into policing in the Cape Town township. The three NGOs approached the Equality Court after police failed to act on recommendations from the commission.
With their police station having only 70 members — including admin staff — to a population of 100,188, residents of eMondlo and the surrounding villages have now taken the law into their own hands.
Less than 300km away lies Pietermaritzburg police station, the province’s best resourced, with 377 posts to serve 20,441 people.
Emmanuel Khanyi, a traditional healer in eMondlo, said residents had lost faith in the police. Rampant stock theft saw the community form reaction forces which search the area for rustlers and stolen cattle.
“When we call the police they never come. I think they only have three cars … Now we deal with the thugs on our own.”
When 10-year-old Khanyisani Ntuli was knocked down and killed by a car while crossing the road in February — just 2.5km from eMondlo police station — irate community members, who caught the driver, waited nearly two hours for police to arrive.
Khanyisani’s grandmother Khaladi, 70, stood over his bloodied body, repeatedly calling the police station. “They took so long to come here because they said they didn’t have a car … so we just had to wait.”
The culpable homicide case is currently before court.
SJC head researcher Dalli Weyers said the court’s ruling showed how police-allocated resources discriminated against people on the basis of race and poverty.
“There has been a cycle where specific communities have been underserved. At some stations the discrimination is dire.
“If you look at murder rates, which have increased and which are the highest at some of the country’s most underresourced stations, one would have expected the police to put more resources into such stations. What this data shows [is that] this is not the case.
“The new formula will have to take poverty into account. It will have to include crime categories, such as murder — and other violent crimes — which is internationally recognised as the most reliable crime indicator.”
Weyers said the police’s plans outlined possible ways forward, including revising formulas which allocated human resources to police stations.
“We are reviewing these documents to see if the formulas really improve resource allocation. If all parties agree we will ask for a structural interdict which will set out timelines for the plan’s actioning.”
In January, police minister Bheki Cele announced a decision to withdraw an earlier appeal against the Equality Court judgment, saying black people had been discriminated against across SA when it came to resource allocation. He and the national police commissioner had “concurred with what the court had to say”, he said.
“There is a skewed way of resource allocation in African areas nationally. Historically the facilities and personnel are less in the historically African areas than compared to the historically white areas. We are … trying to correct the problem.”
Police spokesperson Brigadier Vish Naidoo said the process of implementing the Khayelitsha Commission recommendations has begun “with ever increasing pace.”
South African Cities Network urban safety specialist Siphelele Ngobese said the way resources were channelled correlated with spatial inequality, although there was no correlation between more resources and a reduction in crime rates and violence.
She said crime reduction depended on the smart and correct use of resources from not only the police, but also other government departments.
Unisa criminology professor Rudolph Zinn said underresourcing had significant impact on the solving of crimes.
“It can be seen in the low conviction rate of violent criminals.”