SAPS data failures hurting South Africa’s fight against gun crime

The South African Police Service’s (SAPS) failure to record the make of weapons used in crime across the country is undermining crime analysis and detection efforts.

This is according to Rize Mzansi member of Parliament (MP) Makashule Gana, who pointed to a recent reply to a Parliamentary Q&A from the Minister of Police, Firoz Cachalia.

“Rise Mzansi submitted a list of parliamentary questions to the Minister of Police to ascertain how prevalent the use of the AK-47 is in the commission of crimes,” Gana said.

“This is given the plethora of reports that point to the prevalence of this deadly automatic rifle at crime scenes, particularly crash-in-transit heists, political killings and mass murders.”

Gana highlighted that there are an estimated 2 million illegal firearms in the country, which include AK-47s, as they are prohibited in terms of the South African Firearms Control Act. 

However, according to Cachalia, the Enhanced Firearms Detection Service data can only differentiate between firearm types and not the make.

Therefore, the party has called on SAPS to expand its crime intelligence capacity to identify these weapons and confiscate them systematically.

Additionally, it argues that South Africa must broaden its national firearms amnesty for anonymous tip-offs for illegal guns.

To further crack down on the possession and sale of illegal firearms, Gana says that authorities must seek the harshest mandatory punishment for the offence.

He says this is particularly true for police officers who have been implicated in the theft and resale of confiscated weapons linked to murders and gang violence.

“Moreover, the negligent loss of a SAPS-issued firearm must be a dismissible offence, for which senior SAPS officers must be held accountable,” Gana added.

“Over a period of 6 months, from 1 October 2023 to 31 March 2024, 371 firearms and 29,128 rounds of ammunition belonging to SAPS were recorded as either lost or stolen.”

Gana, a member of the National Assembly’s Portfolio Committee on Police, has said that this matter will be raised at the next available opportunity.

Police losing firearms to criminals

The Rise Mzansi MP’s statistics about firearms lost by SAPS members come from a question he asked the Minister of Police in September 2024.

According to the reply, the most significant portion of firearms stolen was from officers in Gauteng, with 112 taken during the period.

This was followed by KwaZulu-Natal with 68, the Eastern Cape with 54, Mpumalanga with  30 and Limpopo with 28.

Gauteng also saw the highest number of firearms lost by police officers at 9, followed by KZN at 6, the Free State at three, and the North West at 2.

Mpumalanga, the Western Cape, and the Northern Cape were the only provinces where police did not lose weapons during the period.

In 2024, GroundUp reported on data produced by the late Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime researcher Jenni Irish-Qhobosheane, who said the police lost 30,000 firearms between 2003 and 2023.

Eighteen thousand of these weapons were lost in the first decade at a rate of 1,800 firearms annually.

However, Irish-Qhobosheane says these figures only refer to firearms issued to police officers. She says the police fail to report the loss and theft of firearms under their jurisdiction.

These include those kept as evidence and those handed in during amnesty periods.

Irish-Qhobosheane said that former Police Minister Bheki Cele had noted that 357 had vanished from evidence lockers between April 2020 and November 2023.

However, she argued that this was unlikely to be accurate given that 178 had vanished from a single police station, and this was only discovered after police from another station were following up on weapons used in a chas-in-transit heist.

Similarly, Colonel Chris Lodewyk Prinsloo, who was a custodian of a SAPS armoury, pleaded guilty to selling firearms to gangs in the Cape Flats in 2016

While Prinsloo pleaded guilty to selling 2,400 firearms, Irish-Qhobosheane says this figure is more likely to be around 9,000.