Sunday Independent reports that the Democratic Alliance (DA) has called on Police Minister Bheki Cele to address the shortage of detective divisions in the SA Police Service (SAPS).

This was after national police commissioner General Fanie Masemola revealed that the SAPS lost 8,400 detectives since 2016. Masemola made this revelation to the police portfolio committee in Parliament last week and said the number had gone down to 17,000 from 26,000. The DA’s shadow minister of police, Andrew Whitfield, said Cele urgently needed to address the situation. He added that the loss of thousands of skilled detectives was compounded by the fact that those left in the detective service also have a shortage of vehicles. The DA previously exposed that up to 26% of detective vehicles were either broken or inoperable in certain provinces. The party also found that the Detective Service Programme only achieved 43% of its targets. It was even worse that key departments such as the Criminal Records Centre and the Forensics Science Laboratories failed to achieve any of their targets. Anti-crime activist Ian Cameron said poor training had also added to the shortage of detectives. He said there was a need to train the juniors under the supervision of senior detectives to be able to deal with the problem. “We need a specialised unit and specialised detective capacity and not just station capacity,” he pointed out.

• Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Manyane Manyane at Sunday Independent
• Read too, Detective shortage in SA, at The Witness
• And also, Fewer SAPS detectives means less criminal evidence for court, warns criminologist, at EWN

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