This report from ProtectionWeb, published on 1 November 2024.

Recruitment, training, and promotions within the South African Police Service (SAPS) have been sub-optimal, with serious consequences on the professionalism and management of the SAPS, resulting in an urgent need for reform, the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) maintains.

The SAPS is on a massive recruitment drive but the model of recruiting large numbers of low skilled people – 30 000 between 2022 and 2025 – means that the proper selection of new Police recruits often did not take place. Once applicants had shown compliance with the minimum standards, selection was done on the basis of a lottery with no emphasis on selecting the best human material – with even the former requirement of a driver’s licence being dropped.

SAPS basic training has deteriorated markedly and bears little relation to the challenges new Police women and men were likely to confront in South Africa – and was in any case so dumbed down in curriculum to guarantee a “pass one pass all” system in place in training institutions, according to policing expert Gareth Newham, Head of the ISS Justice and Violence Prevention Programme.

“Training in the SAPS emphasises a more military-style approach through, for example, a lot of time marching, collective punishment and learning how to take orders.

However, for police to be effective they have to learn how to take decisions in complex situations, communicate clearly to multiple audiences and solve problems. These skills are not sought-after in the recruitment phase and are not part of the training regime,” Newham told ProtectionWeb.

“This is why the best that can be achieved are large, high visibility tactics such as Operation Shanela – which generate hundreds of thousands of arrests, but have limited impact on crime,” said Newham. He added that most career criminals and organised crime easily side-step these visibility operations.

“Only effective intelligence supporting skilled and resourced detectives will make a real difference in our crime levels. Our policing model has to change to improve the crime situation,” said Newham.

Additionally, he told ProtectionWeb that core Human Resource management functions including recruitment, training and promotions, have been sub-optimal. These have had serious consequences on the professionalism and management of the SAPS.

The promotion system has been extensively abused to compensate for salary increases by former Police Minister Bheki Cele, leading to en masse promotions of officials to raise their pay but ignoring merit and qualifications to align rank with skill levels.

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