JOHANNESBURG - The South African Police Service has advertised 353 vacancies for former detectives to return on fixed-term contracts, as part of efforts to strengthen its investigative capacity.
The appointments come at a time when crime detection remains under pressure, and the backlog in DNA testing continues to delay prosecutions.
READ: Autopsy backlogs | Crisis threatens criminal justice system
Crime expert and UJ research associate Calvin Rafadi said, "The president together with the former minister of police, they signed partnerships with the private sector and we were promised e-labs-that they will be established and that is what the new minister needs to look at and follow it up because those kinds of labs will yield results in combating crime."
"But what I can tell you is that the backlog is so bad to a point that even with gun ballistics, most of them -you can hardly get the results on time and many cases of such magnitude even get thrown out of court and the criminals, that is why they act with such impunity."