Police phone cuts ‘putting lives at risk’

POLICE have no airtime – so do not expect them to respond efficiently when you are in danger. Cellphone allowances of officers in specialised units such as crime intelligence and those driving patrol vehicles have been slashed since last month.

With the police’s 10111 centre operators – the majority of them poorly trained civilians – incapable of properly handling the calls they receive and often not taking down information like addresses correctly, cellphones often mean the difference between life and death.

House robberies are one of South Africans’ worst crime fears.

In house robberies – which police statistics indicate have increased – people have just three minutes to safely call police before being overpowered, research shows.

The average response time to crimes can be up to 20 minutes, according to officers on the ground.

And if you drop a call to 10111 in a panic or the operators fail to ask all the necessary information or call you back, there is little, if anything, patrol officers can do to find you.

Often, if they cannot find a crime scene, especially if it is “minor” crime such as a housebreaking, they declare it “negative”.

The problem was that burglaries often turned into house robberies, especially if homeowners arrived home while the burglars were still inside, Unisa criminologist Rudolph Zinn said.

A Centurion policeman said: “People are dying because of this [communication] bugger up.”

Police spokesman Brigadier Hangwani Mulaudzi failed to respond to e-mailed questions on why cellphone allowances were slashed and what had been done to improve 10111 centres’ service delivery.

It is believed that the cellphone budgets of members of specialised units whose informants tip them off about planned crimes were cut to R350 a month from their usual “open” lines.

Sector policing patrol officers’ cellphone allowances are roughly R80 a month

Research by Unisa and the Council for Industrial and Scientific Research paints a picture of millions of frustrated South Africans, who have been driven to buy their local police cellphones, airtime and two-way radios, to ensure they can be reached in emergencies.

The research focused on Gauteng, Limpopo and Mpumalanga.

Zinn said communication systems meant the difference between life and death.

“In a house robbery, you have three minutes to call for help before robbers get to you,” he said.

“If you drop the call to your local police van, officers must have enough airtime to phone or SMS you back.

“If you phone 10111, operators must be trained to ask you the right questions to get you the right help.”

He said issues with 10111 centres ranged from not being able to get through, to making operators understand the emergency and get police to respond in time.

Zinn said their research, which was now looking at Pretoria and West Rand communities, focused on crime patterns and residents’ frustrations with police communication systems.

“It shows that in many cases police in patrol vehicles either don’t answer their cellphones or don’t return calls,” he said.

“Many communities have been forced to buy their police additional hand-held radios, cellphones and airtime.”

A crime intelligence officer said with the allowance reduction, many of them had resorted to using their private cellphones.

“It’s not like our informants can contact us on our police radios,” he said

A Pretoria police station officer said he had battled for eight years, as a policing sector manager, to get a cellphone.

“Each police station patrol vehicle has one, but only R80 worth of airtime on it,” he said. “The airtime, if we’re lucky, lasts a week.

“If we receive a call and it’s dropped, we radio our station and get them to phone the complainant, which wastes time.”

A former 10111 operator said provinces had been divided into different policing sectors in the past, with each one having its own call centre manned by police from that sector.

“For years now, 10111 centres have been centralised, with operators who only have knowledge of certain areas dispatching police to areas they know nothing about,” the former operator said.

“Combine this with partial information from crime victims and you have a disaster – like last week when we arrived at a Wierdabrug robbery only to realise it was actually in Rosebank.”