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Crime-fighting focus 'to change'
30/11/2005 20:55 - (SA)
Pretoria - The phasing out of the commando system was likely to shift crime-fighting resources from farming areas to urban nodes, criminal justice researcher Jonny Steinberg said on Wednesday.
While commando members would be easily replaced in numbers by police reservists, the crime fighting focus was apt to change, he told an Institute for Security Studies seminar in Pretoria.
With a seven percent annual reduction in contact crime one of the police's current top priorities, the policing of deep rural areas and agricultural crimes would probably suffer in the absence of commandos.
Police station commanders, measured on their performance, would probably focus on bringing down priority crimes, like contact crimes, which were more prevalent in urban areas.
"A station commander's biggest priority is to meet national targets. There will be a struggle between the demands of grassroots problems and (national) performance indicators," Steinberg said.
"The capacity for policing agricultural crime is likely to be sucked into agricultural towns."
In a paper distributed at the seminar, Steinberg said total commando strength at the end of March last year was 43 976, of which just over 26 000 were dormant.
Between April last year and March this year, commando members were involved in 79 004 operations, including farm visits, patrols, roadblocks and cordon-and-search operations.
The government plans to phase out all 183 SA National Defence Force commandos by 2009. Seventeen have already ceased operating, increasing to 70 by next February.
Manpower would be boosted
Replacing an assumed 12 000 commando members working an average of 120 days per year with 20 000 new police reservists on active duty for seven days a month, manpower would be boosted by 14% in annual working days, Steinberg said.
The question was how the police, in taking over commando functions, intended deploying this capacity.
Assistant police commissioner Ben Groenewald told the seminar that rural safety was a priority for the police service. Each police station must have a rural safety plan.
No vacuum would be left by the phasing out of the commandos, he said, adding that less than 30% of current commando members were active in any event.
The police intended boosting its number of functional members from just over 140 000 to 165 850 by March 2008, and improving area crime combating units - later to be replaced by larger zone units.
R60m would be made available to call up 8 000 police reservists in the 2006/07 financial year, each working at least seven days a month.
This figure would grow to R80m the following year for 15 000 reservists, and R125m the year after that to call up at least 25 000 reservists.
The money would cover salaries, which Groenewald said would be comparable to those paid to commando members, and equipment.
The SANDF currently spent about R95m a year on its commando system.
A new national instruction was expected to be signed by national police commissioner Jackie Selebi next week to enable ex-commando members to join the police reservists.
They could also apply to join the police or the defence force on a permanent basis.
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