• President Cyril Ramaphosa will officiate a passing-out parade of 1 400 new police officers later today.
• This latest batch is part of a project to train 10 000 police officers in 2023.
• The new trainees will be used to intensify policing on South African streets.

Later today, President Cyril Ramaphosa will be officiating a passing-out parade of South African Police Service (SAPS) trainees.

He will be addressing 1 400 new trainees at the South African National Defence Force’s 3 South African Infantry Battalion base in Kimberley in the Northern Cape. This Kimberley cohort is part of a larger group across seven provinces where a total of 10 000 officers will mark the end of their basic training.

This forms part of a larger project announced in February this year.

“We are also training another 10 000 this year. That will help with the visibility of police but also it will help us give a pool to train the special units and be able to respond to the different crimes that are happening in South Africa. It does not mean that we are not responding at the present moment,” Police Minister Bheki Cele noted per Defence Web.

At the time Ramaphosa echoed the sentiments of Cele during 2023 State of the Nation Address, noting that more resources would be utilised to intensify efforts to strengthen the SAPS, and in particular by putting more officers on the streets and setting up specialised teams that will focus on specific types of crime.

With 10 000 new officers joining in 2024, it will be interesting to see how effectively the influx of talent will be put to use.

“We as the country’s law enforcement have and will continue to upscale our responses to crime this holiday season and beyond,” added Cele per SA News, ahead of today’s event.

With crime, and violent crime in particular being at an all-time high in the country, it is clear that more needs to be done in order to safeguard South African citizens. Hopefully, this new wave of police officers will go some way to creating a safer society locally.

[Image – CC BY-ND 2.0 DEED GovernmentZA on Flickr]