Independent Police Investigative Directorate (Ipid) investigators are drowning in case loads, as complaints about police officers pile up.
Ipid acting national head of investigations Thuso Keefelakae appeared before the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry on Wednesday and discussed the backlogs plaguing Ipid.
“We are sitting at 11 947 cases and we have the active cases that were still under investigation as of the end of December 2025. We were sitting with 2 456. And the trend, chairperson, is that come the end of the financial year, we would be having 14 000 of the cases that are still active,” Keefelakae said.
“They still need investigation. The investigation is not completed. And then the more we try to complete this backlog cases, this number of cases, then populate the post-decision monitoring cases.
“The more we complete our investigation, take the matters to the stakeholders to discipline their members, metros and the NPA, we then balloon the number of those cases that we refer to as post-decision monitoring cases.
“Because we have completed them, now they are going to and from court. They require subpoenas, you have to then transport this witness from point A to point B because he’s scared, he cannot go there by himself and all of that. So those are the challenges that we’re having.”
Provincial Ipid cases
In total, Ipid had 48 432 cases and 182 investigators countrywide.
“Now, on average, I’m saying here that one Ipid investigator will be sitting with 266 cases. If you look at Gauteng, on average, Gauteng is sitting at 390. That’s out of 32 investigators. And this can also be attributable to the fact that the intake in Gauteng province is very high.
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“And I think it’s also compounded by the fact that we receive death cases, if it’s not daily, it will be just after a day you get a death case. Sometimes you get two in one day. And sometimes in one incident, it’s four bodies.”
‘Violent communities’
The statistics on death cases are no better, said Keefelakae. In Gauteng only, one Ipid investigator could be handling 43 cases.
“But that would be nothing compared to KwaZulu-Natal. Not just in terms of the number of death cases, but also the dead bodies. Even though Gauteng has 390 [cases per investigator] and KwaZulu-Natal has 325, the death cases in KwaZulu-Natal are more compared to death cases in Gauteng.”
However, Keefelakae said the high number of cases against police officers is also a reflection of the communities they are dealing with.
“Ipid having a high number of cases in Gauteng, there is a correlation between what is happening in our communities and what we are having. The observation is that the communities out there, they are also not too kind.
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“If you look at the atrocities that they are committing, it’s worrying because they force the police to go and act in many of these cases. Because the police, they have got no choice.
“But if they hear that there is a robbery in progress, there is residential robbery in progress, there is hijacking in progress, they will respond promptly. When they get there, they are met with fire. And that then generates a lot of death cases.
“When you see more cases of death on the ground in KZN, you must know that the community is there as well. They are very dangerous. They are carrying dangerous weapons.”
Resource constraints at Ipid
Keefelakae said Ipid is facing critical resource constraints, including budget, staffing and vehicles.
“Even if we may seem like we have some vehicles, if you look at the conditions of the vehicles and the type of the vehicles, where we should deal with these matters. So, they delay the resolution of these matters.”
Ipid has since enlisted 10 contract investigators to assist with the backlog and is in the process of adding 15 more.
They will be deployed to the “four big provinces”, which are Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Western Cape and Eastern Cape.
“These four provinces account for over 70% of our total workload in the country. And when you look at the Saps annual report, it will tell you that the problem of crime, if South Africa were to solve the problem of crime in these four provinces, we would have no crime in this country.”
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