Police minister sued over allocation of resources
More than two decades into democracy, the poorest black communities have the lowest allocation of police resources. Now, two NGOs have decided to act.
|||Cape Town - More than two decades into democracy, the poorest black communities, in areas battling the highest violent crime, still have the lowest allocation of police resources.
It is an issue that has been under the spotlight for several years but, because of a lack of political will, the Social Justice Coalition (SJC) and Equal Education have taken Police Minister Nathi Nhleko and the acting national commissioner of police, Kgomotso Phahlane, to court.
On Wednesday, they filed an application with the Western Cape High Court seeking to compel the police ministry to remedy a pattern of unfair discrimination in the allocation of police resources.
The founding affidavit stated that the current arrangement is both “irrational and discriminatory”.
“It provides more police officers to stations servicing rich, white populations with low contact crime rates, and fewer police officers to stations serving poor, black (including both African and coloured) communities with high contact crime rates.
“The result is that residents of these black communities are less safe, more at risk of crime and their constitutional rights are more likely to be violated.”
It said that it was startling that this situation – which is a relic of apartheid – persisted on Thursday.
The head of the SJC’s safety and justice programme, Chumile Sali, said they had decided to go the legal route after trying to engage with the minister since the end of the Khayelitsha Commission in 2014.
He said they had a meeting with an adviser from the ministry last year, who had made a commitment to get back to them by May last year, but there had been no response.
In August, they had protested at Parliament and had been told the minister would respond by the end of October.
“So we feel we have been waiting for too long,” Sali said. “We believe court action will compel the minister to allocate resources more fairly.”
The announcement was made in Makhaza on Wednesday at a site where a police station was supposed to have been built in 2004.
Jean Redpath, a criminologist at the University of the Western Cape, who testified during the Khayelitsha Commission of Inquiry, said the formula used by the police to allocate resources was flawed.
One of the findings of the commission was that this formula was to be reviewed, but it does not appear to have taken place.
Redpath said that when you had poor black communities with the highest murder rates and the lowest allocation of police, it showed there was something wrong.
The SJC and Equal Education said a similar pattern applied in KwaZulu-Natal, where peri-urban black communities with high crime rates were vastly under-resourced compared with other communities.
The application seeks to compel the minister and the national commissioner to take urgent steps to:
l Revise its theoretical system of allocating human resources through an open, consultative process in order to ensure outcomes that are rational and non-discriminatory.
l Make the theoretical and actual allocation of police human resources publicly available.
l Remedy, as a matter of urgency, the discriminatory allocation of resources within the Western Cape.
l Declare that provincial commissioners have the power and the obligation to deviate from the theoretical human resource allocation in order to provide a fair and equitable distribution of police officers.
Musa Zondi, Nhleko’s spokesman, did not respond to an SMS or answer his phone, while provincial police communications head Brigadier Novela Potelwa did not return calls for comment.
helen.bamford@inl.co.za
Cape Argus