POLICE REELING AS ATTACKS ON OFFICERS MOUNT

An increase in the number of attacks on policeman - how can that be? Didn't our esteemed President say that there was 'no crime', so clearly the statistics have been fabricated!

On a serious note - surely something like trauma councilling and debriefing should be complusory - and why does it come out of their medical aid? Surely the cost should be something that the Department of Safety and Security picks up. It's just crazy to expect the medical aid to pay for it! Something is not right with this picture.

Police reeling as attacks on officers mount
Edwin Naidu

November 12 2006 at 11:25AM

The police are buckling under the pressure of a shocking increase in the number of attacks on policemen. The SAPS's recently released annual report reveals that attacks on policemen went up by 76,7 percent to 1 274 during 2005 to 2006, compared with 721 attacks in the previous 12 months. This increase in attacks on policemen is the highest in five years. Compounding the stress on the force were the high annual murder rate of policemen, poor pay, uncertainty over the future and their unrelenting exposure to gruesome crimes, said Bilkis Omar, the senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria.


The annual report said 585 policemen had been murdered in the past five years, 95 of them in the past year. Most of those killed were not on duty.

'Most of the deaths were stress-related'

The men and women were murdered despite increased efforts to improve police officers' vigilance and the training they were given on how to respond to dangerous situations. Omar said stress had resulted in a high number of policemen committing suicide. Charles Nqakula, the minister of safety and security, told parliament recently that, between 1998 and 2002, 508 officers took their own lives. "Most of the deaths were stress-related," Omar said. She said policemen often refused trauma counselling in a display of macho bravado, because the counselling was not confidential and because of fears that the cost of counselling would exhaust the benefits allowance of their medical-aid scheme.

Omar said public-service regulations obliged the SAPS to help policemen when they had dealt with trauma-inducing incidents, such as the rape of a young child. Those traumatised should be debriefed by their commanders and then offered counselling, she said.

Policemen often refuse trauma counselling

But because the debriefing was not compulsory many officers did not take advantage of it."Debriefing is a serious challenge for the police, given the high crime rate," she said. Omar said the police had faced many challenges during the past 12 years, including having to deal with the transformation of the apartheid SAP into today's SAPS, affirmative action and the continuing restructuring of the service.

The police feel that they are poorly paid and unappreciated by the government, and the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union criticised a claim by Trevor Manuel, the minister of finance, who said on Tuesday that the police were fairly paid. The union said the salary for entry-level policemen was R5 740 a month. Several policemen told The Sunday Independent that the minister spoke from a position of privilege. "Manuel does not have to survive on less than R5 000 a month. We have families to feed and children to send to school on the amount he probably spends on groceries," said a frustrated Johannesburg policeman.

A senior police official confirmed that stress was hampering the police, despite programmes to help them deal with it. "We have a problem but we are tackling it vigorously," she said. The attacks on, and murders of, police officers continue. Most of the increase in the number of attacks on policemen could be due to the increase in rioting in protest against tardy service delivery to poor communities, the police annual report said. Most attacks on policemen occurred while they were pursuing suspects and making arrests.

Research, according to the police, did not support the view that policemen were most often killed for their firearms, or that there was a connection between police corruption and police murders. "When policemen are off duty, they are at greater risk of being killed because they are not usually wearing their bullet-proof vests and they are less vigilant than when they are on duty," the report said.

Trevor Bloem, the spokesperson for Nqakula, said counselling services for policemen were under-utilised because of the belief that accepting counselling was a sign of weakness and would be prejudicial to prospects for promotion. Bloem said that, despite training programmes to make the police more streetwise in countering attacks, the number of attacks had risen. But, he said, there had been a decline in police murders, which suggested that the training was having an effect. In 2001 to 2002, 139 police officers were killed and the following year 150, but during the past three years the numbers had come down from 108 to 94 and 95.

This article was originally published on page 1 of Sunday Independent on November 12, 2006