By Zizamele Cebekhulu-Makhaza, President of Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union
As the first and oldest union representing employees within South Africa’s criminal justice cluster, The Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (POPCRU) celebrated the 33rd anniversary of its inception in 2022 under the theme of “33 Years of Working Class Consciousness Defending Workers’ Rights And Building A Self-Sustainable Union”.
As an organisation, POPCRU has achieved numerous successes in defending the rights of our members and creating a unified, professional police service during its 33-year journey. In the past year along, two marches were held, including a national march to the Union Buildings. These marches were aimed at raising issues around police fatalities, high crime rates, wage disputes and challenges within the correctional service, including a lack of resources and prison overcrowding.
A memorandum of demands was handed over to the National Treasury and The Presidency to fill critical vacancies in the police service, stop budget cuts and increase danger allowances. POPCRU also rejected government’s meagre unilateral 3% salary increase.
As a result of ongoing pressure, we are proud to report that the South African Police Service (SAPS) employed 9,252 freshly graduated police members at the end of last year, and had announced plans to bring this number up to a total of 12,000 by the end of its 2022/23 financial year.
This enhanced capacity will go a long way towards assisting our police service in the fight against crime, and towards improving police safety in a difficult crime landscape.
But while this represents a step in the right direction, there are still significant challenges to come, and as POPCRU, we cannot afford to be complacent.
First, it is important to recognise that with poor salary increases and rising costs of living, many of our members are still struggling to make ends meet. Yet, after failing to receive a salary increase for many years, government then announced that it had unilaterally decided to grant our members a meagre 3% increase.
This amount is unacceptable. Workers should not be forced to pay the price for government’s austerity measures, and our members deserve at least a 10% increase to cope financially with rising prices. We will therefore be engaging government further on this matter.
Additionally, budget cuts, poor infrastructure, a lack of resources and training, and staff shortages have reached crisis levels and are preventing our members from performing their work effectively.
To prevent the erosion of the rule of law, we need to support our police and correctional service members by improving the quality of infrastructure and resources available to them in order to allow them to better perform their duties. These include such basics as proper uniforms and working vehicles.
Furthermore, more focus needs to be placed on education and training, as twelve to eighteen months in a police college is insufficient when pitting police members against increasingly sophisticated criminals. Likewise, a lack of training is impacting our members’ performance in court, preventing successful prosecutions to the detriment of our criminal justice system.
Finally, in addition to the urgent need to further capacitate our police service, police resources must be deployed to areas where they will have the most impact. To boost police visibility and activity on the ground, we need to redeploy officers from desk positions in administrative offices to the police station level and increase the number of boots on the ground.
By working to make progress on these issues, we firmly believe that we will not only serve the interests of our members, but that we will be able to make a meaningful difference in improving the safety and security of all South Africans.