10111 is South Africa’s police emergency number. It is where citizens call when their lives are threatened or to report crimes and is an important and integral interface between the people of the Republic and the South African Police Service. In the Western Cape, however, this system is broken and today I will outline the problem and how the public can help to fix it.
The Western Cape 10111 call service receives almost one third of all of South Africa’s 10111 emergency calls at approximately 1.2 million calls per annum. As this service provides life or death responses it is extremely important that the service is running and functioning optimally.
Whilst calls can be answered and recorded, the call scanner which tracks the number of calls to the centre and importantly the number of abandoned calls has been broken since 2013. The last available date for which information is available (and when the call scanner was still working) put the number of abandoned calls at 24%, equating to roughly 295 000 calls. This means that police were not connecting with almost 1 in every 4 calls.
Worryingly, the centre, instead of receiving additional staff and manpower, in an environment of an increasing population and growing crime rate – indicating a bigger need for emergency calls – has seen a decline in staff numbers. According to a 2009 Institute for Security Studies research report, the Western Cape call centre had a total of 196 staff members in 2009 but at our latest visit, it had only 162 staff members.
SAPS is a national government department and funding for these centres is allocated from the national office. The police told the provincial government in 2013 already that the Western Cape was due to receive an upgrade to their 10111 system that same year, however no such upgrade has materialised. The Western Cape call centre is nearly two decades old and in desperate need of an upgrade. Instead, KwaZulu-Natal received a R10million upgrade last year. In 2008, Gauteng received a R600million newly built 10111 centre with a new Control Centre, state-of-the-art radio network system and a new 10111 Call Dispatch Centre. Thanks largely to this initiative, the police response times were reduced in Gauteng.
Several complaints have surfaced recently in the media and in my inbox from people who were unable to reach 10111. We are now asking members of the public to share their experiences with 10111. I will compile this feedback into a report and submit the report to the Provincial and National Police Commissioners, so that these issues can be addressed and so that service delivery can be improved. We have created a hashtag for reporting on Twitter – #WC10111 and an email address WCape10111@gmail.com
The SAPS Task Team Report, prepared at the request of the National Commissioner in the run-up to the Khayelitsha Commission of Inquiry noted that not all complaints received from 10111 are referred to patrol vehicles and sometimes incidents are only captured after the complaint has been attended. The Commission recommended that 10111 be addressed to ensure that members of the public can reliably contact SAPS units either on telephones at the three police stations, or on the 10111 number.
SAPS national has a duty and responsibility to properly resource the Western Cape SAPS, but it appears that the Western Cape SAPS has been overlooked. It is simply inexcusable that fundamental equipment two years later, remains broken. Police officers and call centre staff are dealing with extraordinary volumes of calls and should have enough manpower and good quality equipment to ensure that we can trust in an efficient emergency call service.
Mireille Wenger