The use of the Automated Fingerprint Identification System to improve the quality of service rendered by the South African Police Service on the East Rand

The globalisation process that drives the progression and trans-national nature of crime requires that the police should use sophisticated and/or state-of-the art technologies to help them to combat criminality. The use of technology by the police is thus viewed as one of the appropriate responses to deal with the threats posed by crime. In an attempt to ascertain the significance of technology in police work, this research examined the impact that the use of biometric technology such as the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, has had on the quality of seiVices rendered by the South African Police Service. Following the police's task of identifying criminal fingerprints, the problem encountered in this research was that, ever since the introduction of the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, no research had been conducted to assess the impact thereof on the level and quality of seiVices rendered by the South African Police SeiVice. This problem was further intensified by the fact that there was no framework to assess the impact that the utilisation of the Automated Fingerprint Identification System has had on police work in South Africa. Consequently, the problems that were identified in this research compromised not only the quality of seiVices rendered by the police, but also the safety and security within communities. The findings in this research showed that the utilisation of biometric technologies such as the Automated Fingerprint Identification System have helped the police to accurately identify and arrest criminal suspects. However, some of the conclusions reached suggested that the quantitative aspect of the utilisation of biometric systems and the elated portable apparatuses within the South African Police Service was emphasised more than the qualitative aspect thereof. The emphasis was evident in the statistics regarding the use of the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which focused primarily on police productivity and to a lesser degree on accountability related issues. This study espoused a qualitative paradigm and the investigations in the research were focused on the East Rand policing precinct. The participants who informed this research were selected from the research population using random and purposive sampling techniques. In the same way, the data that informed this research was collected using semi-structured interviews and an in-depth review of the literature on policing and its utilisation of the different technologies. The research espoused social constructivism and phenomenology as the philosophical worldviews of choice to form constructivist phenomenology and to attain theoretical triangulation. Moreover, evaluation research and a case study were espoused as the research designs of choice, to attain methodological triangulation. The various triangulation techniques espoused in this research project were critical in attaining quality assurance in terms of the research methodology applied. In the same way, a myriad of qualitative techniques such as dependability, transferability, confimability and credibility were also employed in order to ensure that the integrity of the data that was collected in this study remained intact. Finally, the data that was collected to inform this research was analysed using the qualitative content analysis technique. Similarly, the measures taken to ensure that the safety of the research participants was delineated in this same research report.Police PracticeM. Tech. (Police Science

An Evaluation of the South African Police Service’s Moral Right to Hold Power in the Mankweng Area

The aim of this study was to evaluate the South African Police Service’s (SAPS’s) moral right to hold power in the Mankweng area. The researcher observed that the SAPS are largely not viewed as having the moral right to hold power. Although it may seem a truism that poor communication between the police and the community may result in lower public confidence and trust in the police, the actual relationship between the two has already been dealt with in other studies. Apart from poor communication, which is seen as a central concern, other factors could affect the image that the public holds on the police. Most of the available literature argue that confidence in the police is known to have significance on citizen’s perception of personal safety and fear of crime. The problem that therefore informs the research is that the police in Mankweng are faced up with a myriad of challenges that undermine public confidence in them. This problem has the propensity to undermine police-community relation, thus the police’s moral right to hold power in the community. This study considers the existing legislative frameworks through the lens of criminological and legal theories, namely Differential Association Theory, Procedural Justice Theory, and Social Contract Theory in order enhance transparency and provide clarity. A qualitative research approach was considered appropriate for this study since it provided the researcher with insight into the lived world of participants by obtaining rich descriptions of how these participants experience on the evaluation of SAPS’s moral right to hold power. In this study, the researcher utilised face-to-face semi-structured interviews as primary data gathering technique. For sampling purposes, 25, including Five (05) SAPS management and 20 community members, as participants, they were all interviewed in this study. The researcher followed a phenomenological data analysis process in order to provide a comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon as experienced by the participants based on evaluating SAPS’s moral right to hold power in the Mankweng area. This study found that communication breakdown, inclusive to not giving feedback and to what extend is the investigation of reported cases, failure on the part of the police to value the importance of Community Police Forums (CPF’s), always citing lack of transport to transport members of the CPF to meetings as there is lack of proper allocation and use of state vehicles, unfaithfulness and mistrust to be the main causes of the identified research problem. For recommendations, the local SAPS’s actions and an increase of unappealing practices has raised a number of safety concerns among South African citizens, neighbouring countries and perhaps international communities and it is recommended that collaboratively working on these findings can enhance policing in the communal level, such as the study area