In his latest interview with Chris Steyn, Ian Cameron, Chair of Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Police, reveals the answer he received from Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia on the number of abandoned 10111 calls: almost 1.8 million during the 2025-26 financial year. “That's about 5,000 calls per day. I mean if we really want to try and quantify it and give people an idea of the human impact of that, imagine you've got 5,000 victims calling for help and those calls are abandoned…He (the Minister) then further admits that genuine emergencies go unanswered. He acknowledged that in some cases, people that are literally facing life-threatening situations cannot connect to available operators because of excessive queues, system disconnections, and limited capacity.” Meanwhile, Cameron also expresses grave concern at the lack of progress with analysis of DNA samples from the 12 Ekurhuleni murders. “The response was shocking because the minister actually failed to provide any kind of a clear account... In fact, the reply explicitly says that the information is not readily available. Why not just answer us? So, I must be honest, I'm doubting the forensic process in this case…You can imagine what it feels like to the families of these victims when they hear this type of thing. “.Listen here.Edited transcript of the interview.Chris Steyn (00:01.042)Just how many 1011 calls were abandoned in the 25-26 financial year? That was the question Ian Cameron, Chair of Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Police, asked Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia. Ian is here with the answer from the acting minister. Welcome, Ian.Ian (00:28.12)Thank you, Chris.Chris Steyn (00:29.714)Well, what did he say?Ian (00:32.942)So it's quite a disturbing number. You'd remember a few months ago we spoke about a case where a complainant or a member of the public called 10111 in Cape Town saying that he noticed whilst driving past Dunoon on the N7 that there were people attempting to set other people alight, which in itself is a very disturbing call to get. Now there were many issues, not only technically but with the controller, the operator as well. Long story short the call basically dropped and they didn't get the immediate response that was needed and just a few hours later four people had been necklaced and and killed and now I say this as context for how important 10111 is: it is literally in many cases your line of hope if you have no way of defending yourself or getting assistance close by: that is the number that the majority of South Africans would call. I asked the Acting Minister of Police, what do the abandonment numbers look like? And his answer indicated that...almost 1.8 million calls to 10111 were recorded as abandoned during the 2025-26 financial year. So that's about 20 % of all their calls that are abandoned, that don't get handled or a response. And that's about 5,000 calls per day. I mean if we really want to try and quantify it and give people an idea of the human impact of that. Imagine you've got 5,000 victims calling for help and those calls are abandoned. It has a significant impact if you start scaling that amount of people or imagining that amount of people in your mind and it simply is not acceptable.Chris Steyn (02:44.872)And what explanation did the acting police minister give?Ian (02:50.039)So firstly, I must say that the Acting Minister of Police, Acting Minister Cachalia has been really forthcoming with everything. In most cases, in the large majority of questions I've asked, we haven't struggled to get information out of them. And I think that's something that we need to commend. There is certainly an improvement in terms of transparency from the minister's office. He admitted to us that SAPS, in terms of 10111, is severely understaffed, literally severely understaffed.In fact, the reply actually explicitly said that the ratio of operators to incoming calls is, and then I quote, severely inadequate to meet public demand. So it's not something that I'm saying; those are the words used by the minister in the answer. He then further admits that genuine emergencies go unanswered. He acknowledged that in some cases, people that are literally facing life-threatening situations cannot connect to available operators because of excessive queue, system disconnections and limited capacity. And then if we look at, for example, this is really troublesome and I'll explain why now. If you look at a place like Port Shepstone, they have got an abandonment rate of over 56%. So more than half of their calls are abandoned and that is in a space of over three years that they've had the same problem. So no one can tell us that they didn't know about it. And then if we look at Maitland that serves Cape Town and you know what the gang violence scenario is in and around Cape Town, they recorded nearly 380,000 abandoned calls. So that's about 30 % of their calls that are abandoned.Chris Steyn (04:47.536)Ian, how do you believe this can be dealt with?Ian (04:52.523)So I think there's more than one approach. The one is that we really need a major major shift in terms of the use of technology. The city of Cape Town Metro has has offered many a time to the South African Police Service that they would assist them with their dispatching model and that they could even use parts of it and and that they could actually work together on it which in my opinion is a no-brainer, but I think they are political ideals and political squabbles at play when it comes to SAPS being a national government entity and then obviously the city being a local government entity. So just in terms of using better technology, that's the one. Let me give you a critical example. So the system that SAPS is currently using at Maitland Flying Squad or 10111, they are situated in the same place. They literally couldn't provide us with any data from 2022, 2023 financial year up until including 24, 25, because of system errors. Now, that means that for a space of three years, we've got no way of measuring improvement or decline in service delivery, generally speaking. And it seems, when we look at the data that they gave us, that abandoned calls are actually increasing much faster than call volume. So, the reason I say that, we looked at eight specific 10111 centres that had available data for at least two of the years and abandoned calls at those centres increased by over 20 percent and incoming calls only increased by 2 percent. So we really have a major challenge with regards to that. I've even gone as far as saying I think in some cases even if it's just in specific areas you could have public private partnerships; you could private…Ian (06:57.135)…parts of it and I can just imagine how certain people would lose their minds by me saying, you know, that possibly there should be privatisation. But there has to be something we can do to change how the system is being run because the large majority of 10111 centers are Stone Age style call centres. In fact, the basic thing, say for example, Chris, you call me as a 10111 operator and you say to me, I am in Pretoria Central and I need help right now and you drop the call. That operator has no way of seeing where you are. They can't even do basic phone triangulation. They've got no way of seeing the location of the caller, which in itself becomes very problematic.Chris Steyn (07:49.823)And many people don't even bother to call 10111 because they know they're not going to get an answer. Imagine if everybody was still calling. Instead they call security companies, private security companies, or they just deal with it themselves.Ian (08:06.315)100 % and I think the latter dealing with it themselves is what happens in the large majority of communities because most people don't have money for private security and so they don't have a choice but to deal with it themselves and then we see an increase in vigilante justice, et cetera and it's difficult to blame people because they get frustrated with the system that doesn't work. I can tell you from personal experience with members of Flying Squad who are meant to be the ones responding on behalf of the police to high risk incidents in progress so armed robbery and progress robbery aggravate etc. They are the ones that literally chase those types of incidents. When you speak to them, many of them are so frustrated by this 10111 process that it doesn't function the way that it should because they are waiting for the call. They want to work. They are sitting there ready to go but the the so-called feeding line of incidents doesn't function the way that it should and and likewise with a lot of the 10111 operators I can tell you I know many 10111 operators and many of them are incredible humans; you can imagine the trauma that they experience every single day even though it's secondhand trauma, the impact that that must have on just your general mental well-being is insane. So the fact that they hang in there; some of them use their own cell phones when their systems are down, they buy their own data or air time just to try and assist members of the public and it shouldn't be that way. These are not in my opinion at least difficult things to address. So I think technology, having enough people, obviously well-trained people, giving them a proper rank structure: at the moment the large majority of operators or clerks that became constables are stuck in their ranks, giving them solid career progression. It must be seen as a fully fledged, for lack of a better description, 9111 system where they have a proper career progression picture of where they are heading.Chris Steyn (10:20.018)You also asked the acting police minister for an update on the testing of DNA samples taken from the Ekuhuleni murder scenes. What did he have to say toIan (10:32.779)Yeah, this is quite disturbing. I asked specific parliamentary questions in my DA MP capacity regarding 12 of the murder cases in Ekurhuleni where I asked them about the status of forensic exhibits, specifically DNA, with regards to those 12 murders. And I specifically asked whether they can confirm that the DNA analysis has been completed.And the response to my parliamentary question concerning those DNA exhibits was shocking because the minister actually failed to provide any kind of a clear account of whether it's been completed and or if it's outstanding. They just simply didn't answer. In fact, the reply explicitly says that the information is not readily available. Now, if you prioritise a case like that, something that has an entire country almost, I wanna say, nervous, then how could you not have that readily available? Surely, if you are looking at something that could potentially be at that stage where it was said that they hadn't confirmed or not confirmed whether it was a serial offender or not, surely, that should be readily available. So they could not give us no dates, no timelines, no deadlines, and they couldn't even give us an indication of which individual exhibits of those 12 murders had been received, how long they have been outstanding, or when the analysis of those specific exhibits was to be completed or may have been completed already. So the minister...Ian (12:31.887)…basically says, and I quote, he says, accurate reporting will be provided once the entire analysis has been completed. Parliament, and this is from me then, where I answered and said, but you're basically leaving us as Parliament unable to establish any kind of progress with this kind of answer.Chris Steyn (12:53.246)I've always felt a concern that those crime scenes might not have been properly processed, you know, with usable DNA, especially the early ones before it became big news.Ian (13:07.181)100%, and remember that there were several suspects arrested. Now the question is, were they swabbed properly? Was DNA taken from them? Where are those samples? So apart from having the actual samples from the scenes, where are those specific samples from the suspects? And the fact that the acting minister's answer says they will communicate at an opportune interval, what does that actually mean? I mean, surely, when you have something urgent, it must have been, even if it's internally, there must be some kind of a deadline. They gave no deadline. There's no measurable commitment as to when we can expect resolve, and it's now already many weeks later. So I'm very concerned because this feeds from the whole DNA backlog issue. It feeds from what we hear about the really chaotic situation at some of the forensic labs. And yeah, I think maybe I should also add that the minister in the answer generally refers to the complexity of DNA analysis and he speaks of the collaboration between detectives and the lab, but he doesn't identify what is still missing. So why not just answer us? Why not give? So I must be honest, I'm doubting the forensic process in this case.Chris Steyn (14:37.894)And if this is happening with a priority case, we can just imagine what's happening with a case that is not in the news, not a priority.Ian (14:46.721)Well, remember when you and I, Chris, when we spoke about the DNA backlog not too long ago, it was close to 300,000 cases. And when we had the DNA Board just a few weeks ago, along with SAPS internal audit come and present to the Police Committee, their own numbers differed from each other. So I'm very, concerned. I really am doubting whether these processes are actually being driven properly. Obviously, here and there, you've got matters that are done well, but in this case, the central message to me from the response that we got is that the minister cannot tell parliament how much DNA analysis remains outstanding in priority cases, never mind all the others. He can't tell us how long they've been waiting or whether they've been completed or will be completed, and we also don't know when we can expect to see any kind of progress…You can imagine what it feels like to the families of these victims when they hear this type of thing. Remember, and I'm babbling so I'll say the last bit, when we look at the DNA exhibit entries from what was told to us in July, they said just about 300,000 cases. Now of those 300,000, 230,000 of them were already beyond the 90-day time frame and the reported average age of overdue entries was more or less 800 days. So this backlog is massive. Now you can imagine, if you want to try and prioritise something, how difficult it is with this queue of hundreds of thousands of exhibits that need processing.Chris Steyn (16:41.798)Any other issue you would like to air?Ian (16:45.965)Chris, I think those are critical ones. I think 10111 and the DNA issue, both in these cases, are practical examples of how policing not only is failing, but can be fixed, in my opinion, quite simply. I personally don't think that it needs to be made so difficult to fix some or address some of these issues. I personally think that by getting one or two of the right professionals on board and even such people and some of our existing forensic experts in the police and saying but how do we rethink this? And having solid deadlines, targets, et cetera. I think we can turn it around. It's the same with 101q1. These are not such complex issues and we definitely, I am completely convinced that we have all of the experts we need right here in South Africa. We just need to utilise them properly.Chris Steyn (17:48.51)Indeed. Thank you. That was Ian Cameron. Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Police Chairperson Speaking to BizNews. I'm Chris Steyn. Thank you, Ian.Ian (18:00.641)Thanks, Chris..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.