Every year, an estimated 1,800 state-owned firearms are lost or stolen, enter the illegal market, and end up in the hands of criminals. (Archive photo provided by Western Cape Government)
South Africa has 2.2 million firearms owned by 502 national agencies. Of these, an estimated 1,800 are lost or stolen each year and end up on the illegal market and into the hands of criminals.
However, the only state agency reporting lost or stolen firearms is the police. The SAPS, together with the South African National Defense Force (SANDF), owns less than 30% of the total number of state-owned firearms.
Jenny Irish-Koboshane, a researcher at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, spoke on Thursday at the Institute for Security Studies, which focused on the latest policy brief, “Targeting firearms crime will make South Africa safer.” Speaking at a seminar on ISS, he said the SANDF and other national agencies should: Report lost or stolen firearms to the Central Firearms Registry, which they do not do.
“That's not true. They're not like that at all,” she said, calling it “shocking.”
He said an analysis by the Police Civilian Secretariat, which collected information on losses between 2003 and 2013 from media reports and information from the Central Firearms Registry, put the total loss of firearms at 18,000 over 10 years. He said he concluded that there is.
Meanwhile, the average number of firearm-related homicides in South Africa increased from 23 to 34 per day in the 2021/22 financial year.
Although there has been a reduction in illegal firearms crossing the border into South Africa, “a far more worrying factor is the domestic source”, Irish-Koboshane said.
Police report the loss or theft of police-issued firearms (firearms in the possession of a police officer), but not firearms that are under police jurisdiction, such as firearms held as evidence or surrendered for destruction during an amnesty period. No firearms have been reported lost or stolen.
Former Police Minister Bheki Cele has confirmed that at least 357 firearms disappeared from evidence storage between April 2020 and November 2023, the Irish news agency Coboshane said.
“I don't believe this is an accurate number,” Irish Koboshane said. That's because 178 of these firearms went missing from a single base, Norwood. It was first discovered when police from another station were tracking the weapon used in a cash-in-transit robbery in which a police officer was killed.
“They checked with forensics and found that one of those firearms was stored in an evidence vault in Norwood.”
Only then did they discover that 178 firearms were missing.
In 2016, Vereeniging-based police officer Col. Chris Lodevik Prinsloo pleaded guilty to selling firearms to gangs and other criminal networks on the Cape Flats. Prinsloo, the SAPS armory manager, confessed to selling 2,400 firearms, but Koboshane, who is Irish, believes the figure was much higher, around 9,000.
Issues with the Central Firearms Registry and fraudulent firearms licenses issued through corrupt underworld figures are also at stake, as revealed in the current court case.
He said 63,500 civilian licensed firearms were lost or stolen between 2013 and 2023, but the recovery rate was relatively high at about 60%.
Approximately 30,000 police-issued firearms were reported lost or stolen from 2003 to 2023, but the recovery rate was “significantly lower” than for civilian firearms. This raises the question whether many of these firearms were not actually lost or stolen, but instead were “given” to criminals.
The number of firearms lost or stolen in the SANDF is unknown. Media reports and parliamentary inquiries revealed that a “significant number” were missing.
Similar to the Norwood Police Department, stolen SANDF firearms were also discovered by default. This was the case in 2019 when 19 assault rifles were stolen from Lyttleton Army Base in Pretoria.
“If you look at the SAPS annual report, you see numbers like this: 67 firearms were lost to government agencies.Then you look at the media and you see that a Metropolitan Police Department lost 67 firearms in the same year. So how did only 67 people from all government departments get reported to the police?'' asked Mr Coboshane, an Irishman.
Although the SANDF does not report theft or loss of ammunition, at least 330 rounds of R4 ammunition were lost in 2018/19. Meanwhile, police lost 9 million rounds of ammunition between 2014 and 2019, she said.
This means that while police, who arrested 125,000 people for possession of illegal firearms and ammunition between 2014 and 2023, were trying to empty the pool of illegal firearms, “the faucet was still running.'' ” was shown.
Cases involving firearms lost to the state also stalled or went missing. As an example, she said a 2014 incident found that “more than half” of the 300 illegal firearms (112 of which were assault rifles) found in a private residence in Norwood came from the state. Ta. Despite promising an investigation and her continued pursuit of the case “for the past three years,” the case went missing.
Need for criminal information
ISS police expert David Bruce, who wrote the ISS policy brief, said the illegal distribution of firearms was increasing the likelihood of mass killings, such as the shooting deaths of 18 people in Lusikisiki last month.
Mr Bruce said ISS published 11 recommendations in June on how to strengthen SAPS and improve crime reduction. These included the need for SAPS to map firearms crimes. This allows police resources to be better focused on targeted areas.
Mr Bruce said ISS mapping showed that firearms crime was most prevalent in Gauteng, Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, but increasing in Eastern Cape and Mpumalanga.
He said SAPS needs to put in place an integrated strategy to collect and consolidate information on firearms offences. This includes strengthening the quality of criminal records and improving ballistics testing. To trace the connections between firearm sources and criminals, the information must be integrated into a database.
Bruce said that although SAPS had “very good information at its disposal”, that information was not being used effectively.
Cooperation with national prosecutorial authorities is also necessary, particularly in more complex cases involving organized crime.
Resources for investigating firearms crimes needed to be properly organized, with specialized units.
Lastly, the Central Firearms Registry needs to be strengthened, he said.
The Central Firearms Registry is dysfunctional.
Gauteng Department of Community Safety Deputy Director-General Freddie Hrunwani said during a departmental assessment of the Firearms Control Act, very basic information such as how many firearms Central Firearms Registration (CFR) officers receive and process each month It turned out that he was unable to answer such questions.
“Maybe there is something wrong with the CFR itself,” Hrunwani said.
He said the law does not address the issue of illegal firearms, but rather regulates legal firearms. However, legal firearms were stolen from legal gun owners, private security companies, SAPS, SANDF, and other government departments and distributed to the illegal market.
He said police have failed to even monitor legal firearms and keep proper records. They could only meet legal gun owners once every five years when they came to renew their licenses. Unannounced visits to firearms permit holders are required. Similarly, unannounced inspections of police stations and their firearms registries are required “at all times.”
Additional roadblocks are necessary as they often lead to the recovery of illegal firearms.
The recovered firearms were found to have been recorded as destroyed in the Central Firearms Registry.
He said SAPS and Home Affairs systems need to work together to ensure that firearms in a deceased estate are confiscated by police upon the license holder's death and either destroyed or stored until the estate's beneficiaries obtain a firearms licence. He said there is.
He said harsher penalties are also needed for those convicted of crimes involving firearms.
accurate crime statistics
SAPS Crime Registrar Major General Norman Sekhukhune said crime registrars are responsible for collecting accurate crime statistics down to the station level.
Sekhukhune said the correlation between firearm-related homicides and the number of firearms is not “one-to-one.” A single firearm could be linked to numerous murders in different states, and criminals sometimes rented out firearms.
Forensic investigations revealed that one firearm was used by different criminals in 35 separate murders in multiple states.
He said that to minimize this, police needed to “fully understand” how firearms entered the illegal market and how they were distributed.
This article was first published by GroundUp.
