DURBAN – The already-understaffed South African Police Service (SAPS) has from 2017 to date, lost 284 officers due to suicide and homicide-suicide incidents.
This was revealed by the Minister of Police, Bheki Cele, in a written reply he gave to Michéle Clarke of the DA.
The lawmaker wanted to know the extent of suicide within the ranks of the SAPS.
She also wanted it to be broken down according to financial years. The response by Cele shows that the 2017-2018 period was the worst year as 64 individual suicide cases were recorded, while 19 homicide-suicides were recorded.
Homicide-suicide is described as the incident when a person kills one or more people before killing themselves.
Since then, there has been a decline in both categories as, during the 2018-2019 period, 44 individuals died by suicide while 17 homicide-suicide incidents were recorded.
In the 2019-2020 period, the number of suicides declined to 33 while homicide-suicides declined to 12.
Another decline was recorded during the 2020-2021 period when 30 individual suicides were recorded. This was while 10 homicide-suicides were recorded during the same period.
However, in the 2021-2022 period, the number of individual suicides peaked a bit when 39 cases were recorded. There was also a jump in homicide-suicide in the same period as 16 cases were recorded (in the previous period there were 10 cases).
According to Cele’s response, from April 1 this year to June 13, when MP Clarke posed her questions, there were only two cases of individual suicides within the ranks of the SAPS.
No case of homicide-suicide was recorded during the same period.
The figures given by Cele to Clarke were not broken down by provinces and they did not specify whether the SAPS was aware of what was causing their members to take their own lives, or those of their own partners in some cases.
According to a news article penned for The Conversation in February 2016 by Gráinne Perkins who, at the time, was a PhD student at the Centre of Criminology at the University of Cape Town, the Marikana Commission of Inquiry highlighted the high prevalence of depression and post-traumatic stress, as known precursors to suicide, among SAPS members.
She said according to the report, of the 153 000 (estimated) SAPS personnel, 10 000 officers suffered from depression and 2 700 from post-traumatic stress disorder.
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