A member of the public alerted us to a problem with the police crime reporting scheme.
- A man reported a theft to Sea Point police station. It took a week for him to receive a case number and for a detective to be assigned to the case.
- This was apparently due to a glitch with the police crime reporting scheme.
- Even if the scheme is down, this should not delay the investigation of a crime, a police officer informed us.
- The police gain not officially responded to our questions.
The South African Police Service (SAPS) national crime reporting computer scheme has been experiencing glitches. It was reportedly offline the whole weekend and has been on and off since.
When reporting a crime, SAPS uses two systems – the Integrated Case Docket Management Scheme (ICDMS) and the older Crime Administration Scheme (CAS).
The ICDMS, which is set to ultimately replace CAS, generates eDockets which are predominantly used by detectives. According to the government news website: “eDocket allows for an integrated method of monitoring police documents, dockets and the storage thereof. This will ultimately reduce the chances of dockets going missing or being tampered with”.
Last Thursday, a source, who preferred to stay anonymous so as to not jeopardise his case, went to the Sea Point police station to report a case of theft and it took a week – until Thursday morning – for him to receive a case number and for a detective to be assigned to his case.
When enquiring at the police station about the cause of his wait he said he was told that the “national police computer scheme is offline and I must be patient”.
A police officer confirmed to GroundUp that there was a scheme issue, and the scheme was on and off, but there was no acumen that it should affect the work of the police.
“System glitches happen, but they never last as long as seven days. There could be a number of reasons for the scheme to disappear offline, like an electrical fault or honest a fault in the scheme. But this doesn’t mean that when a complainant comes to the police station to report a crime, they should be sent away, or they should receive minimal encourage.”
“If the scheme is offline, information and details can still be captured manually. Every police station has a crime register. This is where you write down all the necessary information from a complainant for a docket to be opened. Once the docket is opened, it can be taken to the nearest police station by an officer and the information captured on the scheme.”
“This is honest a simple case of laziness from the police. There is always a solution to every problem,” said the officer.
We asked an officer at the Rondebosch police station whether their computer scheme was offline. The officers on duty said, “I don’t know. We haven’t used it today.”
GroundUp asked the provincial SAPS for comment on Wednesday and was referred to Brigadier Mathe from national SAPS. After not answering calls and replying instead to a WhatsApp text, Mathe asked GroundUp to send the queries on WhatsApp. No response came.
On Thursday morning, after GroundUp contacted Mathe again, the response, which came at around 8am, was: “I haven’t received a response let me check and send a reminder.” Calls thereafter to Mathe were neither answered nor returned.
© 2023 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and execute not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We place an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We execute not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We enact not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please execute not delete the invisible pixel.
Kazami of Truth
Fun South African Fact: The meandering 850km road through Cape Winelands is the world’s longest wine route.
AxelRoad
Van, startled, spins around and answers the rep, \”It\’s my donkey\’s ears. When they walk under the highway their ears rub along the roof and hurt them. I\’m making it taller so that doesn\’t happen\”.
The rep looking confused, because it\’s a dirt track that runs under the bridge, asks him, \”Why don\’t you grade or dig some of the soil to lower the surface so they can pass through without their ears touching?\”
Van – no the one looking confused then angry answers, \”No man, it\’s their ears that are too long, not their legs!\”