A senior police official is appealing to government to assist the Family Violence Child Protection and Sexual Offences (FCS) Section in Butterworth with proper offices, as he says that it is hard for them to do their job and to consult with the victims.
The source who wants to remain anonymous, said there are a lot of challenges they are facing which sometimes lead to delays in finalising their cases.
“We are using offices that are not adequate for our victims because most of the time we are dealing with children and old people. It is hard for them to use steps in order to reach our offices. We don’t have privacy, even though we are dealing with cases that are very crucial whereby you need to be with the victim only.
“Unfortunately, in our offices we don’t have space to do that because of the situation,” the source claimed.
“Secondly, the areas that we are servicing are very wide. We are servicing Msobomvu Police Station, Kei Bridge Police Station, Butterworth Police Station, Centane Police Station, Dutywa Police Station and Willowvale Police Station,” he said.
According to him, it is hard to service these areas because of the distances. He confirmed that these challenges lead to them looking like failures to other people who don’t know their situation.
“Even the number of detectives is very small, yet we have so many cases. We are only helped by members who come from other areas to do intervention. At the same time that is not good enough because they stay maybe for a week and leave us again. Even though this intervention is helping us, it is still not enough.”
He said they are appealing to the government to assist them with office accommodation and clerks because they have only one administration officer, so if he or she is on leave everything comes to a halt. Besides this, he added that they also need vehicles which are more powerful because the cars they are using are not suitable for driving in the deep rural areas they are servicing.
Police spokesperson, Brigadier Tembinkosi Kinana, said the above issues were being attended to by the department. “However, it must be clarified that some of the challenges highlighted are not a competence of the SAPS but that of the Department of Public Works, as the custodian of government buildings,” said Kinana.
He said measures were underway to address all identified challenges within the organisation.
Spokesperson for the Department of Public Works, Vuyokazi Mbanjwa, said the police stations were maintained by the national office.
