ANA reports that Parliament's police portfolio committee said on Sunday that more resources needed to be allocated to police specialised units combating highly trained and heavily armed cash-in-transit (CIT) robbers and for other high-risk operations.
The killing of a member of the SA Police Service (SAPS) special task force and a member of police crime intelligence during a shootout with armed CIT robbers near Nongoma in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) on Friday night was a sad day for all law-abiding South Africans, committee chairman Francois Beukman said in a statement. “The SAPS lost highly trained members who were at the forefront in the fight against violent crime. It is a big loss to our nation. Their deaths are a huge loss to SAPS, the specialised units, and their respective families,” he said. Beukman went on to state: “The specialised units of the SAPS face life-threatening and dangerous situations daily, and all necessary steps should be taken from a budgetary, logistical, and training perspective to support them appropriately.” He indicated that the committee would support an increase in the budget for the sub-programme of specialised interventions of the SAPS, which was allocated R4.3 billion in the current financial year.
- Read the report on this story in full at Independent News
- Read the portfolio committee’s press statement at Parliament News
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