Government is losing 1,800 firearms a year to criminals

There are 2.2-million firearms owned by 502 state entities in South Africa. Of these, an estimated 1,800 are being lost or stolen every year, entering the illicit market and finding their way into the hands of criminals.

Yet, the only state entity that reports some of its lost or stolen firearms is the police. SAPS, along with the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), own less than 30% of the total number of state-owned firearms.

Speaking on Thursday at an Institute for Security Studies (ISS) seminar focusing on its latest policy brief, Targeting firearm crime will make South Africa safer, Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime researcher Jenni Irish-Qhobosheane said the SANDF and other state entities were supposed to report their firearm losses and thefts to the Central Firearms Registry, but they do not do this.

“They don’t. They simply don’t,” she said, and it was “shocking”.

She said analysis by the Civilian Secretariat for Police, gathering information on losses between 2003 and 2013 gleaned from media reports and information from the Central Firearms Registry, concluded that the total loss of firearms was 18,000 over the ten-year period.

Meanwhile, the average number of firearm-related murders in South Africa has risen from 23 per day in the 2021/22 financial year, to 34.

Illegal firearms entering South Africa from across the borders has decreased, and “a far more concerning factor is the domestic sources”, said Irish-Qhobosheane.

While police report the loss or theft of police-issue firearms (those carried by officers), the loss or theft of firearms under its jurisdiction, such as those kept as evidence and those handed in for destruction during amnesty periods, is not reported.

Irish-Qhobosheane said former police minister Bheki Cele acknowledged that at least 357 firearms had vanished from evidence stores between April 2020 and November 2023.

“We don’t believe this is an accurate figure,” said Irish-Qhobosheane, as 178 of those firearms had gone missing from a single station – Norwood. This was only discovered when police from another station were following up on weapons used in a cash-in-transit heist in which a police officer had been killed.

“When they checked with forensics, one of those firearms was listed as being in the evidence store in Norwood.”

It was only then that they discovered 178 firearms had gone missing, she said.

In 2016, Vereeniging-based policeman Colonel Chris Lodewyk Prinsloo pleaded guilty to selling firearms to Cape Flats gangs and other criminal networks. Prinsloo, a custodian of a SAPS armoury, confessed to selling 2,400 firearms, but Irish-Qhobosheane believes the figure was much higher – about 9,000.

Fraudulent firearms licences issued through corruption to underworld figures and problems with the Central Firearms Registry are also a problem, as illustrated in current court cases.

She said while 63,500 licensed civilian firearms had been lost or stolen between 2013 and 2023, the recovery rate was relatively high at about 60%.

In the period 2003 to 2023, about 30,000 police issued firearms were reported lost or stolen, but the recovery rate was “significantly lower” than for civilian arms. This raises the question of whether many of those firearms had not actually been lost or stolen, but were “handed over” to criminals.

The number of firearms lost or stolen from the SANDF is unknown. Media reports and parliamentary questions have revealed a “significant number” have gone missing.

As with the Norwood police station, theft of SANDF firearms was sometimes discovered by default. This was the case at the Lyttleton army base in Pretoria where 19 assault rifles were stolen in 2019.

“If you scan the annual reports of SAPS you’ll see figures like: 67 firearms lost by government departments. Then you scan the media and you see that one metropolitan police department lost 700 weapons in that same year. So how were only 67 across all government departments reported to the police?” asked Irish-Qhobosheane.

The SANDF did not report ammunition theft and loss but at least 330 rounds of R4 ammunition were lost in 2018/19. Meanwhile, the police, she said, lost nine-million rounds between 2014 and 2019.

This indicated that while police were trying to empty the pool of illegal firearms, having arrested 125,000 people for possession of illegal firearms and ammunition between 2014 and 2023, “the tap was still running”.

Cases involving firearms lost by the state were also stalled or missing. As an example, she said in a 2014 case “more than half” of 300 illegal firearms (112 of which were assault rifles) found in a civilian home in Norwood were found to have come from the state. Despite promises of an investigation and her continually following up on the case “for the last three years”, the case has disappeared.

Need for crime intelligence

ISS policing expert David Bruce, who authored the ISS policy brief, said the circulation of illegal firearms made mass killings, such as 18 people shot dead in Lusikisiki last month, more likely.

Bruce said the ISS had in June released 11 recommendations on how to strengthen SAPS and improve crime reduction. Among these was the need for SAPS to map firearm crime, as it would enable police resources to be better focused on targeted areas.

Bruce said ISS mapping showed firearm crime was most prevalent in Gauteng, Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, but increasing in the Eastern Cape and Mpumalanga.

He said SAPS needs to introduce an integrated strategy for collecting and synthesising information about firearm crime. This would involve strengthening the quality of crime records and improving ballistic testing. The information should be consolidated in a database to trace the links between the sources of firearms and criminals.

While SAPS had “very good information at its disposal”, the information wasn’t used effectively, said Bruce.

There is also a need for cooperation with the National Prosecuting Authority, particularly on more complex cases involving organised crime.

Resources for investigating firearm crime needed to be properly organised, with dedicated units.

Finally, the Central Firearms Registry needed to strengthened, he said.

Central Firearms Registry dysfunctional

Gauteng Department of Community Safety deputy director Freddy Hlungwani said during a departmental evaluation of the Firearms Control Act, they found Central Firearms Registry (CFR) personnel could not respond to very basic questions, such as how many firearms they received and processed per month.

“There might be something wrong within the CFR itself,” said Hlungwani.

He said the Act did not address the issue of illegal firearms, but was about regulating legal firearms. Yet, legal firearms entered the illegal market when they were stolen from legal firearm owners, private security companies, the SAPS, the SANDF, and other government departments.

He said police were not even able to monitor and keep proper records of lawful firearms. They only saw legal firearm owners once every five years when they came to renew their licence. Unannounced visits to firearm licence holders are needed. Similarly, unannounced inspections “all the time” of police stations and their firearm registers are needed.

More roadblocks are needed as these often led to the recovery of illegal firearms.

Recovered firearms were found to have been recorded in the Central Firearms Registry as having been destroyed.

He said SAPS and Home Affairs systems need to be linked so that firearms in deceased estates could be confiscated by the police upon the death of a licence holder, and destroyed or kept until the beneficiary of the estate obtained a firearm licence.

Harsher sentences were also needed for those found guilty of committing crimes with firearms, he said.

Accurate crime statistics

SAPS Crime Registrar Major-General Norman Sekhukune said the crime registrar was responsible for collecting accurate crime statistics, down to station level.

Sekhukune said the correlation between firearm-related murders and the number of firearms was not “one-to-one”. One firearm could be linked to a number of murders across different provinces, and firearms were sometimes hired out by criminals.

Forensic investigations found one firearm had been used by different criminals in 35 separate murders across a number of provinces.

He said police needed to gain a “full understanding” of how firearms moved into the illegal market and how they circulated, in order to minimise this.

This article was first published by GroundUp.