Last week Ian Cameron, who chairs Parliament’s police committee, wrote for us on the collapse of South Africa’s forensics system. According to him, the police face a backlog of 298 710 DNA samples, of which 228 017 are older than the prescribed 90-day period, with the average overdue entry around 800 days old. Evidence from rape, murder, and child sexual offence cases is sitting on shelves untested for years, potentially allowing offenders to escape detection or continue committing crimes. Cameron argues that this is not simply a shortage of laboratory capacity, but a broader failure of management, maintenance, staffing, and planning.

The solution is to privatise the state’s forensics capacity.

Private labs should be contracted to deliver services ranging from visiting crime scenes to collect forensic evidence to testing that evidence, developing a national DNA database, and then presenting that evidence to a court.

Proper forensic evidence presented to a court is the shortest route to cutting South Africa’s horrific robbery and rape plague. Some years ago, a detective from Scotland Yard who was in South Africa told the story of how shocked he was when interviewing South African detectives about their main objective, only to hear them say that it was “to get a confession”. He could only imagine the methods they were using to do that.

Think through why South African detectives turn to torturing crime-scene suspects they know to be guilty. Some of them do it because they have a deep sense of responsibility to protect the public from horror, and they know that there are some people who are so evil that they must never be allowed to walk the streets.

At Scotland Yard, the main job objective of a detective was to present evidence to a court.

Fixing South Africa’s broken forensics system is the single-most important step towards putting the country’s detectives in a position to do that and, therefore, also the single-most important step towards cutting the horrific levels of criminal violence.

Beyond the day-to-day rank incompetence on display, South Africa’s police have been infiltrated by criminal syndicates to such an extent that it is no longer feasible to think that the police will, on their own, turn the tide. Private reaction and crime-prevention firms have gone a long way towards addressing some of the consequences of that, but are not able to gather and process forensic evidence to present to a court. Changing that would be one of the most positive moves that Parliament’s police committee, under the excellent Cameron, could make.