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The Citizen reports that according to Gun Free SA, law enforcement officers carrying their guns while off duty were at risk of being exposed to theft, suicides and family homicides.
The organisation’s Adele Kirsten said that research, nationally and globally, has shown that it was not safe for cops to have their service pistols on them outside of work. Kirsten pointed out that SA was faced with a problem of police killings, with most of the officers being attacked while off-duty. Attacks on officers result in their firearms being taken away by criminals, and in some cases they are used to kill them. Kirsten said that preventing the scourge of attacks on law enforcement officers would require an audit to establish which cops needed to be armed, even when they were not on duty. While the SA Policing Union (SAPU) believed it was necessary for officers to carry their guns for safety reasons, even when they are off-duty, according to Kirsten, a policy needed to be adopted to control the movement of the firearms. According to SAPU secretary Tumelo Mogodiseng, police officers have a duty to act on crimes that they might come across while they were off duty. The Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (Popcru) pointed out that while the issue of off-duty officers carrying firearms was complex, the weapons were issued to them as tools of trade for policing. The union also noted that because there were safes provided for the officers, they were not expected to take their guns to places such as those of entertainment.
- Read the full original of the above report at The Citizen
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