The South African Police Services (SAPS) 10111 emergency centres are overspending, but are still understaffed, suffer from ICT downtime and struggle to deal with rising call volumes.
Police minister Nathi Mthethwa, in reply to parliamentary questions by DA shadow deputy minister of police, Debbie Schafer, revealed the majority of centres were not staffed to capacity and that they had spent above their allocated budgets for two financial years.
Parliament, the emergency services, the auditor-general and the public have slammed the centres for being ineffective and rendering SAPS services futile. All commented that, despite using systems which digitally track the response of each police vehicle and record all communication with the caller, the police have continuously failed to improve on service delivery.
The SAPS operates five centres in the Eastern Cape; four in the Free State; one in Gauteng, the Northern Cape, Western Cape and Northwest province; and another three in Durban. The SAPS is setting up three contact centres in Mpumalanga.
In the 2006/7 financial year, the centres received budget allocations totalling R15.3 million, but spent a total of R18.9 million. In the following financial year, they underspent their R22 million budget.
In the 2008/09 financial year the centres spent R34 million. They were only allocated R29 million. In the current financial year, the centres were allocated R19 million, but have only spent R9 million.
Persistent problems
In November, there were several reports that the centres were offline. Eugene Opperman, spokesman for the office of the provincial commissioner in Gauteng, says the telephone system developed an electronic problem and the Gauteng centre was unable to receive any incoming calls for about 90 minutes. The centre was fully functional again, after that incident, he says.
While Opperman says the operational functioning of the Gauteng contact centre is reviewed regularly, problems with the centres have continued over the years.
In August, the findings of the auditor-general's performance audit of service delivery at police stations and 10111 centres across the country revealed poor response times at the centres. The report stated that centres continue to be plagued by system and equipment failures, despite investments in the latest technology. The audit, which was conducted over two years - 2007 and 2008 - revealed the use of technology did not have the desired outcome.
In September, Emergency Medical Services (EMS) called for the faster implementation of the 112 centres, saying 10111 centres are failing. EMS notes the centralised emergency number has become an urgent issue and delayed response times will continue without the introduction of 112 centres.
Ineffective improvements
In April 2008, the SAPS belatedly announced it was considering implementing business continuity solutions at the R600 million Midrand 10111 contact centre. This followed a data line fault which left the centre unable to take calls from the public or assist officers in the field for six hours.
The data line fault which left the centre unable to access the police's central mainframe was not the first time the police's digital network had crashed.
The centres in Mpumalanga recently announced they would implement a digital private automatic branch exchange with telephone exchange infrastructure and sufficient incoming lines through two exchanges to provide for the estimated number of calls.
Several other centres also announced improvements, which would include an integrated system data network with several software packages, including automatic call distribution, automatic number identification, automatic location identification and computer telephony integration.
However, despite introducing these measures, the minister revealed the centres are still struggling to improve their operational functionality.
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