HR Pulse

1 060 detectives left the SAPS last year – not surprising

Lt-Gen Vineshkumar Moonoo, South Africa's top detective, told parliament's portfolio committee on police that 1 060 detectives have left the South African Police Services (SAPS) in the last financial year. When one looks at the violence metered out against policemen and –women, it's not surprising that this has happened.

In order to obtain evidence to back up my statement, which I made at the end of the previous paragraph, I performed a very rudimentary test on Google and typed in the following question: "why are policemen leaving the police force" and I requested that only South African sources be searched. Here are the first two search results:

If one looks at it purely from an employment relationship point of view, an employee needs to feel safe and secure in his/her work environment. Obviously, a policeman/-woman realises that the nature of the job is inherently dangerous, however it isn't right that these men and women are subjected to so much danger in their daily jobs that they are leaving in droves. Honestly, I don't blame these 1 000-odd detectives for leaving – do you?

Lia Marus is the editor of HR Pulse. She has a BA in French, Italian and Linguistics from UCT, an MA in translation from Wits and a Postgraduate Diploma in Management from the Wits Business School. She is currently studying towards her LLB through Unisa. Lia started her career off in corporate communications, where she worked as a sub-editor, researcher and marketing coordinator. She then heeded the call of the publishing world and went into the business-to-business publishing field. She worked as a sub-editor as well as a chief sub-editor. Before joining ITWeb, she managed an HR guidebook at a leading international publishing company.