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Nqakula 'broke his promises'
09/07/2007 17:49 - (SA)
Cape Town - Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqakula will look into Democratic Alliance allegations about problems in the restructured specialised Family Violence, Child Abuse and Sexual Offences (FCS) units and take corrective steps if necessary.
Nqakula's spokesperson Hangwani Mulaudzi said on Monday that, previously, the FCS units were based in area offices, meaning they sometimes had to travel "hundreds of kilometres" to attend to a case.
Officers now had been redeployed to police stations, to spread them out and enhance service delivery.
This had been explained to and accepted by the community at large.
'Deprioritised crimes'
However, the Democratic Alliance should "publish" its comprehensive report on a station-by-station survey the party did of two provinces where the FCS restructuring process was recently implemented - Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal.
The report would then be studied and if it was found that corrective action was necessary, this would be done, Mulaudzi said.
Earlier on Monday, DA spokesperson Mike Waters told a media briefing that closing the FCS units and redeploying their members had deprioritised crimes against women and children.
The DA said its survey showed that most, if not all, of the promises Nqakula made in this regard were being broken.
The truth was that many specially trained FCS officers were now operating as ordinary police officers, and all FCS officers were under instruction by their station commanders to work only at the stations at which they were based, leaving vast areas with no coverage by FCS-trained officers.
Not in a good state, claims DA
FCS officers were also at the bottom of the pile in terms of allocation of resources, and victim-friendly offices were almost non-existent.
"It is clear from the DA's survey that the direct consequence of this migration process has been a deprioritisation of crimes against women and children," Waters said.
Waters said not a single one of the FCS operations surveyed by the DA could be described as being in a good state, and more than 40% were concluded to be non-functional.
"The reality is that in large parts of these two provinces, the victims of sexual and violent assault can no longer turn to anyone who is trained to deal with their situation."
Key problems were restricted coverage, bad distribution of FCS officers, and social crimes were not getting priority, said Waters.
- SAPA
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