Africa-Press – South-Africa. Despite crime rates continuing to climb, the police’s budget for visible policing will again decline. They also continue to spend more money on protection services than investigating so-called priority crimes.
The police presented its budget and annual performance plan to the Portfolio Committee on Police on Wednesday. Their total budget for the 2022/23 financial year is R100.695 billion, compared to the previous year’s R100.474 billion.
Adriaan Basson: 5 survival tips for the new police chief, General Fannie Masemola At the start of the meeting, committee chairperson Tina Joemat-Pettersson said the police have one of the biggest budgets in the country.
She added despite the nominal increase of about R225 million, their allocation in real terms decreased by R4.1 billion. “For the second year, the largest decrease in the budget allocation is in the department’s core service delivery programme, namely visible policing,” said Joemat-Pettersson.
“This committee has to look at the reduction in visible policing when in fact the country needs to have more visible policing.” Budget 2022: Some reprieve for SA’s floundering corruption busters She was also concerned about the floundering forensic laboratories’ budget.
“Despite the significant challenges faced within forensic laboratories sub-programme, the sub-programme’s allocation was reduced from R1.57 billion to R1.5 billion.”
According to the police’s presentation to the committee, visible policing was the only one of their five main programmes that would receive less money this year than it did in 2021/22.
The police’s administration will get R20.361 billion in 2022/23, an increase of R102 million from the previous year. The visible policing budget for 2022/23 is R51.716 billion, a drop of R508 million.
Detective services get R20.760 billion, an increase of R427 million. Crime Intelligence gets R4.362 billion, an increase of R65 million. Protection and Security Services get R3.496 billion, an increase of R35 million.
The police’s chief financial officer remarked these increases were less than inflation. The Directorate for Priority Crime Investigations, better known as the Hawks, receives its budget out of the R20.760 billion budgeted for detective services.
It only gets R2.167 billion, or 10.48%, of this figure. However, it increases by 4.67% from the previous year’s R2.079 billion. VIP protection are the executive’s ‘tools of trade’, says deputy police minister
This means the police will again be spending more money on protecting politicians and other “identified dignitaries”, and national key points, like Parliament, than it does on what they deem “priority crimes” like criminal syndicates, cash-in-transit heists and corruption.
When the police made a similar presentation to the committee last year, they indicated visible policing’s budget shrunk by almost R4 billion, with its sub-programme crime prevention absorbing most of the cut. The police’s most recent crime statistics, provided in February, again painted a grim picture, with an increase in murders.
For More News And Analysis About South-Africa Follow Africa-Press
