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National police commissioner General Riah Phiyega says that crowd control training had not been a priority after 1994 as the country had become pretty stable.<\/p>\n
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The police management admitted yesterday that training of officers to deal with crowds \u2013 or so-called public order policing \u2013 had been neglected in recent years and particularly since SA hosted the 2010 soccer World Cup. <\/p>\n
During a briefing to Parliament\u2019s police committee yesterday, the police top brass \u2013 including national police commissioner General Riah Phiyega \u2013 explained that crowd control training had \u201cnot been a priority\u201d after 1994 as the country had become \u201cpretty stable\u201d. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt is only in the wake of the new protests that crowd management training is once more coming to the fore,\u201d briefing documents revealed. <\/p>\n
The top officers had been called to brief the committee on the role of crime intelligence in the police as well as the extent of specialist training over the past couple of years. <\/p>\n
Events in Marikana, where 34 striking miners were gunned down on August 16, have raised serious questions about the police\u2019s preparedness in dealing with crowds when confronted with such volatile situations. <\/p>\n
Jonny Steinberg, a research associate at Oxford University\u2019s Centre for Criminology and a specialist in SA policing policy, has pointed to a lack of training and a sharp decline in specialist expertise within the police under former commissioner Jackie Selebi as a probable explanation for the Mari-kana massacre. <\/p>\n
Speaking to the Daily Maverick\u2019s Mandy de Waal this week, Steinberg noted that under Selebi, 278 specialist police units had been closed down. <\/p>\n
\u201cMarikana is about public order policing. It has to do with a very specialist function and what has happened to that [function]\u2026 If there had been proper public order policing [at Marikana] there would have been all sorts of alternatives to try before resorting to live ammunition,\u201d Steinberg was quoted as saying. <\/p>\n
Yesterday\u2019s briefing documents appeared to confirm Steinberg\u2019s claims. One stated that \u201cpost-1994 euphoria led to the erosion of crowd management [skills] as there were no unrests anymore\u201d. And although such training was stepped up before the World Cup, police figures indicate a sharp decline in crowd management training immediately after the event. <\/p>\n
For instance, between 2008 and 2010, 7 693 officers attended one of the four primary crowd control training courses. But in 2011, just 922 officers attended, with the figure declining to 322 officers expected to attend in the 2012\/2013 financial year. <\/p>\n
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