Zuma’s crime response full of holes – a reader responds

This from a commenter on this blog calling himself Ian Doha:

President Zuma – you mentioned ongoing meetings with the public sector. The public sector has shown its inability to deal with crime over and over. It is time to draw in private sector resources to a greater extent -not guards, but their planning capability, like at BAC and SABRIC, to name only two.
To raise the numbers of policemen by 20-odd thousand is not going to get results – focusing on developing their capabilities will. Read up a bit on capabilities-based planning as approached by especially military forces elsewhere.
Throwing more money at Forensic Science Laboratories will be meaningless unless the people’s capabilities are developed, or better people recruited. From personal experience I know that the equipment is there but the majority of the personnel do not even know how to use standard computer software.
Changing the name of the service to a force (a) harkens back to the apartheid years, and (b) will by itself do nothing to promote effectiveness – only more money to be spent on changing stationary, vehicle signage etc. The same goes for the rank structure. By the way Mr. President, the name “inspector” is world-wide recognised as a police rank.
Cash in transit heists – the private sector, under the auspices of the SARB, have now for 5 years been given time to sort out their business and to ensure that they self-regulate and put proper standards in place. This has obviously failed so government regulation should be the next step. Use the best practise standards of a company like SBV and enforce it throughout. This will soon get rid of the fly-by-nights.
It is good and well to talk up a storm about action that wil be taken against poor station commanders, but it is time that you start making some examples. Some of these commanders are literaly getting away with murder.
Your refer to the crime stats as showing “considerable progress”. Well, I suggest you talk to the head of crime statistics and find out exactly how the stats are calculated – it will make your blood curdle. Then engage the banking sector and insurance sector to obtain the real levels of fraud in only those environments. The police commercial crime stats only relate to reported cases.
In the final analysis the problem of crime can be traced back to the following five issues: (1) the porous borders (see the contribution of foreigners to inter alia fraud, CIT, bank robberies); (2) lack of visible policing; (3) an ineffective prosecution system; (4) lack of properly embarking on PPP strategies harnessing the private sector (despite the fact that you all say you do); (5) failure to recognise that most of the trio crimes are organised in nature, and dealing with it accordingly.

Couldn’t have put it better myself. Thanks Ian