News24 | Trust is earned: Police urged to treat everyone fairly

Dr Andrew Faull stressed that fair treatment by police improves public trust and cooperation.

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• Dr Andrew Faull stressed that fair treatment by police improves public trust and cooperation.
• Community trust in the police is strained by poor service delivery, slow response times, and resource gaps.
• This was discussed at the Institute for Security Studies’ conference on evidence-based policing.
• For more political news, visit News24 Politics.

If people believe the police would treat them fairly, they are more likely to cooperate.

This was Dr Andrew Faull’s message at a panel discussion on trust in the police at the Institute for Security Studies’ (ISS) conference on evidence-based policing in Cape Town on Tuesday.

Faull, head of operational support at the City of Cape Town’s safety and security directorate, was participating in a panel discussion with Sebastian Abrahams, deputy chairperson of the Western Cape Provincial Community Policing Forum (CPF) Board and David Bruce, senior consultant for the ISS’s justice and violence prevention programme, with Diketso Mufamadi-Mathebula, a project manager at the ISS, as the moderator.

Abraham said that communities have lost a lot of trust in the police in recent months. He said this is due to service delivery issues, slow response times, and a lack of resources. People in rural areas feel especially neglected because they are often hard to reach due to a lack of vehicles capable of handling rough terrain.

However, he said there remains some trust in the police, as people still call the police for help.

Faull said it is not surprising that people are generally unsatisfied with the police the world over, they call the police when bad things happen to them.

He said CPF members, who deal with the police more closely, judge the police more favourably than the general public. He said South Africans want effectiveness from the police.

READ | Justice system needs ‘a serious overhaul’, says NDPP Andy Mothibi

Abrahams said trust in the police would improve if they treated everyone fairly.

Faull expanded that this meant more than just treating different victims of crime fairly. It meant treating victims, witnesses and perpetrators fairly.

He said that if people believed the police would treat them fairly, they are more likely to cooperate with the police and obey the law.

Treating people fairly as a police officer involves giving people a voice, treating everyone equally and demonstrating trustworthiness.

While the discussion on trust in the police was taking place at the Waterfront in Cape Town, former deputy national commissioner for crime detection, Shadrack Sibiya, was denied bail in the Randburg Magistrate’s Court. He is accused of sexually grooming a 16-year-old girl and raping an 18-year-old earlier this year. He is also a central figure in allegations of corruption that emerged from the Madlanga Commission.

READ | Calls for reforms as Madlanga report looms over policing

The conference discussed the Madlanga Commission on Monday, when criminologist Prof Irvin Kinnes said that with the Madlanga Commission in its final stretch, it is the “quiet before the storm”.

He said there are three events that will shape policing, the first being the elections, with the violence and political killings straining police resources.

The second is the release of the Madlanga Commission’s report, expected in January, which Kinnes thinks will be a “watershed moment”, and finally the ANC’s elective conference at the end of 2027, which Kinnes thinks will be the “hand grenade in all of this”.

Former National Director of Public Prosecutions Vusi Pikoli said he was “quite optimistic” that the Madlanga Commission would have a positive impact.