More than 6 000 police officers nationally were tasked with protecting a few “important” people, most of them politicians, while many police stations in poor communities were faced with stark resource shortages, the Khayelitsha Commission heard on Monday.
Most of the severely under-resourced stations were in poor “coloured or black” areas, prompting commission chairwoman Justice Kate O’Regen to remark that this list of stations read like “an apartheid list”.
In her testimony, Jean Redpath, of the Community Law Centre at the University of the Western Cape, told the commission there were “anomalies” in the allocation of resources in the SAPS and that the process used was not fair. “The under-resourcing 20 years after apartheid is still unconscionable and irrational.”
One allocation Redpath questioned was the deployment of 6 363 officers to the VIP protection unit. The unit, tasked with protecting the president and other parliamentarians, took up a “relatively” huge amount. “There are 6 363 officers that we are using to protect our important people and so there is a related question: Is that rational?” Redpath asked.
She argued that the Theoretical Resource Requirement, a formula used to determine allocations, was irrational…
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