Geisha Kow­lessar

An ur­gent call is be­ing made to po­lice of­fi­cers to im­prove the low de­tec­tion rate. Deputy Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er in charge of Op­er­a­tions, Jack Ewats­ki, in an in­ter­view yes­ter­day, al­so was con­cerned about the in­abil­i­ty of his charges to gen­er­ate ev­i­dence, say­ing in most in­stances he was dis­sat­is­fied with the de­tec­tion rate. Say­ing the low de­tec­tion rate still re­mained a very trou­bling is­sue for the Po­lice Ser­vice, Ewats­ki added: "We have been hold­ing meet­ings with all our re­gions and an is­sue that keeps be­ing raised is the fact that our de­tec­tion rate is too low and every­body agrees with that."

Not­ing that new strate­gies need­ed to be de­vel­oped to in­crease the de­tec­tion rate, the se­nior cop said there were sev­er­al fac­tors that need­ed to be im­ple­ment­ed. He added: "There are a num­ber of things that con­tribute to a low de­tec­tion rate and it is a com­bi­na­tion of whether or not we are util­is­ing all the tech­nol­o­gy we have to solve crimes, whether or not we are us­ing the right peo­ple to solve these crimes. "We have a con­cern with our abil­i­ty to gen­er­ate ev­i­dence through the pub­lic, through wit­ness­es or peo­ple want­i­ng to be in­volved in pro­vid­ing us with in­for­ma­tion." Ques­tioned whether the low de­tec­tion rate re­vealed the in­abil­i­ty on the part of the po­lice to solve crimes, in­clud­ing homi­cides, Ewats­ki said per­for­mance could be im­proved through ei­ther train­ing, de­vel­op­ment or bet­ter ap­proach­es.

The mur­der fig­ure al­so re­mained an­oth­er trou­bling as­pect for the Po­lice Ser­vice as Ewats­ki said this year, thus far, there have been a large num­ber of killings. "Even though there is a down­ward trend in the amount of mur­ders we are still very con­cerned that which ex­ists to­day is still high," Ewats­ki said. De­scrib­ing a mur­der as a very dif­fi­cult crime to pre­vent, Ewats­ki said po­lice of­fi­cers would con­tin­ue to pur­sue crim­i­nal el­e­ments and bring them to jus­tice. "When we talk about crime there are oth­er crimes that we have to con­cern our­selves with too and I think we are con­tin­u­ing to see a down­ward trend in the amount of se­ri­ous crimes," he added.