AfriForum achieves enormous victory for police reservists

The North Gauteng High Court granted AfriForum’s application today force the South African Police Service (SAPS) to send police reservists bound to the Kameeldrift police station for their annual competency training, so that they can remain reservists in future.

Thus far the SAPS has refused or put off the training of reservists and sending existing officials for retraining. As a result, reservists could not sufficiently support the SAPS because in terms of legislation they are incompetent to handle firearms. The police did not oppose AfriForum’s application.

“AfriForum brought this application and believes that it is of national importance, as the number of police reservists has decreased nationally by more than 80% between 2010 and 2018. This means that a loss of more than 60 000 people are at the police’s disposal to help combat crime. It is a great victory for us to turn this statistic around, especially in the Kameeldrift area – which has been plagued by a wave of crime lately – that mainly included farm attacks,” says Ian Cameron, AfriForum’s Head of Community Safety.

According to Cameron, the SAPS has furthermore indicated on various occasions that they do not possess the manpower, and therefore capacity, to execute their constitutional mandate to keep people in the country safe.

“This court ruling empowers reservists and ensures that there is a larger crime-fighting force available to combat crime.”

“AfriForum’s application compels the SAPS to ensure that reservists in Kameeldrift complete their competency retraining, as per the relevant legislation (including the Firearms Control Act, as well as the SAPS’s national instruction 3 of 2014). This ruling paves the way for similar applications on a national level and therefore concerns all reservists in the country,” says Marnus Kamfer, AfriForum’s Legal and Risk Manager for Community Safety.