The South African Police Service spent every rand of its detective services budget for 2025 to 2026, R15.5-billion in total, yet delivered only 63% of its performance targets. The Auditor-General of South Africa, presenting to Parliament on Friday, 2 October 2026, put the operational verdict bluntly: full budget spending with underachievement suggests resources are not translating into intended operational results.
The presentation, screened during a police committee meeting, laid out a delivery picture across two core divisions, detective services and the Police Forensic Science Laboratories, in which money has flowed but functioning capacity has not followed.
In detective services, the numbers describe a service running on overstretched and increasingly inexperienced staff. Some detectives are managing between 600 and 800 dockets each. Of the country’s 3,294 detectives, 1,227 have five years or less in the service, while 379 are older than 55 and the average age is about 43. The Auditor-General warned that reliance on highly experienced detectives creates the risk of losing institutional knowledge, specialised skills and investigative expertise through retirement. Newly appointed detectives with limited experience, the presentation noted, are managing substantial caseloads with limited mentorship and support, and high caseloads could compromise the quality of investigations and dockets.
The caseload backlog itself is substantial. Eight audited policing districts began the year with an unresolved contact-crime caseload of 114,378 cases, of which 43% was carried forward from the prior year. Of those cases, only 37% led to arrests and court proceedings, 21% were withdrawn and 10% were closed as undetected. A further 32% was carried forward to 2026-27, increasing the backlog and pressure on detective resources. The presentation recommended rebalancing workloads and implementing proper succession planning.
Meanwhile, the forensic science division, which supports criminal investigations through forensic evidence analysis, spent its full budget of R1.7-billion but achieved only a third of its performance targets. The Auditor-General said the effectiveness and service delivery of the laboratories are being undermined by several operational and infrastructure challenges.
Those challenges are concrete. Contracts for archiving forensic case files and for supplying biology consumables had either expired or not been renewed, resulting in cluttered office space, reliance on quotation-based procurement, administrative inefficiencies and potential delays in service delivery. In the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape, a significant number of PCs were outdated or not functioning, affecting productivity, data capturing and compatibility with current technology requirements such as Windows 11. The Auditor-General said the issue points to inadequate lifecycle management.
Equipment sits idle for want of consumables. DNA extraction instruments, referred to in the presentation as StarPlus DNA isolation robots, were not being used because the necessary tubes were unavailable, limiting DNA extraction capacity and possibly contributing to sample-processing delays and investigation backlogs. A procurement failure compounds the problem: three years ago the SAPS awarded a five-year contract for semi-automated DNA processing consumables, but it had never been used. The Auditor-General warned this could expose police to possible breach-of-contract claims and financial loss, and suggests weaknesses in procurement planning and needs assessment.
Taken together, the Auditor-General found, these problems could delay forensic evidence processing, add to case backlogs and result in case withdrawals because of unavailable evidence. Ultimately, this delays justice for both victims and accused persons.
The findings land at a moment of turbulence among law enforcers, especially within the SAPS, where various officers have been criminally charged. This week, suspended Deputy National Police Commissioner Shadrack Sibiya has been appearing in a Gauteng court, seeking bail following his recent arrest on rape, sexual exploitation and trafficking charges. The scandal erupted last year when KwaZulu-Natal Police Commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi alleged that a cartel had infiltrated the criminal justice sector, politics and the private sector. Since then, several law enforcers have been suspended, arrested and criminally charged, while others, like sidelined National Police Commissioner Fannie Masemola, have been criminally charged and subsequently cleared. All of this unfolds as the police service tries to get a grip on gender-based violence and femicide in the country.
The fallout has prompted what police leaders call a reset agenda. A few months ago, Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia explained that it requires a multi-year turnaround strategy that is consistently implemented. “The actions we take in this financial year should contribute to the foundations upon which a strengthened SAPS can be built,” Cachalia said, adding: “We won’t promise miracles or short-term fixes. What matters is that the direction we are taking is clear and the goals are firm.”
The state of the detective service and forensic science divisions, as outlined in the Auditor-General’s presentation, reiterates that the reset agenda requires intense work. Whether the SAPS can turn full budgets into functioning capacity, rather than backlogs and idle equipment, is the question the next audit cycle will have to answer.