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Police Minister Senzo Mchunu cited budgetary constraints as a challenge in dealing with rural safety.
Police Minister Senzo Mchunu. Picture: Gallo Images
Rural safety, farm attacks and murders took center stage in Parliament as activists urged authorities to boost police visibility and deploy more officers to address escalating security concerns.
In a joint briefing to Parliament’s Portfolio Committees on Police and Agriculture on Wednesday, Susan Pienaar, the head for proactive policing within the visible policing and operations division of the South African Police Service (Saps), outlined the progress of the national rural safety strategy.
“This is now our last year of the strategy. We started in 2019 up to 2024 and in the next financial year, we need to review the strategy,” she said.
According to Pienaar, by the end of the third quarter of the 2024/2025 financial year, 891 out of 900 identified rural and mixed rural-urban police stations had fully implemented the strategy.
However, she highlighted several challenges in the plan’s execution, including poor investment in infrastructure such as roads, inadequate policing resources, and the remoteness of certain rural areas, which hampers service delivery.
Other issues include cross-border crime like stock theft, insufficient staffing at some police stations, and poor intergovernmental cooperation.
“Land rights that are misunderstood or the long process in dealing with land issues contribute to protest actions and conflict,” she added.
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Pienaar pointed out a shortage of personnel in police units handling stock theft.
Nationally, these units have a staff complement granted of 1 259, but there are only 755 personnel currently in those units.
“In other words, there is a vacancy rate or a shortage of personnel of 504 nationally.”
Between April 2024 and February 2025, a total of 23 679 stock theft cases were reported.
Of these, 4 889 remain under investigation, 2 068 were found to be unfounded, and 4 842 proceeded to court.
A total of 791 cases resulted in convictions, while 125 ended with not guilty verdicts.
Pienaar noted a decline in most crimes affecting rural communities in the third quarter, including farm or smallholding murders, which decreased from 22 to 12 compared to the same period last year.
Of these 12 victims, four were farm employees, five were farm dwellers, one was a farmer, and one was a farm security guard.
“One was not specified and this is a person who does not live on a farm but apparently went to check on livestock and was later found murdered on another farm,” she explained.
Seven of these murder cases remain under investigation, one has been referred to prosecutors, and four are currently before the courts.
Twelve arrests have been made, with nine cases already appearing in court, while three were not enrolled.
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Pienaar said measures were in place to analyse and validate incidents in rural areas, including farms and smallholdings.
“We are not able to, from our current information systems, accurately identify when a case is related to rural safety.
“Sometimes you have a murder case that may not be recorded at a rural farm, but it may have originated from a farm.
“So, we need to analyse reports of incidents that happened at farms and small holdings and validate to determine which are those statistics that we will include in the release of crime statistics as rural safety-related cases.”
Furthermore, Pienaar explained that Saps divisions meet bi-weekly to analyse reports from police stations and categorise incidents for crime statistics.
“This integrated incident comparison committee was established in January 2025.
“They compare limited but not private information of all reported incidents, and that allows us to ensure that when we release the crime stats, it should not be a surprise to anybody — they should all be aware.
“But we are also actively engaging still with organisations such as Agri SA and AfriForum on the statistics.
“Essentially, we are willing to keep engaging on this if there are stakeholders who feel that they don’t agree with our statistics.”
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She added that Saps had met with AfriForum earlier this week.
The discrepancy in crime statistics between Saps and stakeholders like AfriForum, Pienaar explained, is due to the fact that the police only work with reported incidents where there is a victim, complainant, or witness who formally reports the crime.
Another reason is that police definitions of violent crime and rural areas may differ from those used by other organisations.
“We, for instance, exclude domestic violence-related incidents or incidents that result from people who live on the same farm, socialise, and maybe there’s a fight and an assault case is opened.
“We would not include that in this database. We also capture our statistics per financial year, and unfortunately, not all organisations use the same financial year, so we may have different reporting periods.”
Reading a petition to MPs, activist Kallie Roux called for a comprehensive rural safety plan to be implemented.
“This plan needs to take a community-focused, boots-on-the-ground approach to rural safety, which includes the extensive use of technology in new ways and proposals for greater police visibility to keep rural residents safe.”
Roux also urged for farm attacks to be classified as priority crimes to ensure that more resources are allocated to rural safety units.
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Additionally, Niels Nilsson acknowledged that the rural safety plan was well-structured, but said its implementation remained a challenge.
“What we experience due to the police service on ground level is that the public is losing trust in the police and also the criminal justice system, so it happens that the public is starting to take the law into their own hands.”
Petrus Sitho, an activist against farm murders, echoed similar sentiments.
“We need protection of our farmers and our food security no matter what colour,” Sitho said.
Meanwhile, Police Minister Senzo Mchunu acknowledged the lack of trust in law enforcement.
“Trust can only be built and achieved over time,” he said.
He also cited budgetary constraints as a challenge in dealing with rural safety.
“We also need to acknowledge constraints in terms of budgets.”
To optimise resources, Mchunu said plans were underway to close Saps’ inspectorate analysis centre and service complaints unit and disband police killing units, with funds redirected elsewhere.
“We’d rather take those resources and put them where there’s much more demand because we’re not going to expand our budget overnight in the way that we want.
“So we’d rather use the resources that we have and optimise on that.”
Mchunu indicated that from 1 April, the structure of crime statistics reporting would change.
“We will always prioritise, among others, rural stats, but in a different format,” he said.
The minister added that the police would be ready to announce additional measures to enhance security in rural areas next month.
NOW READ: Mchunu defends crime stats, dares AfriForum to prove farm murders claims
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