In a bid to address a growing workload and to beef up capacity, the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (Ipid) is to redeploy hundreds of investigators across SA.

The police watchdog made the announcement on Thursday.

Ipid spokesperson Ndileka Cola said a recent assessment had been done of the police watchdog’s available personnel capacity against the workload.

“The exercise resulted in the directorate taking a strategic decision to realign and regroup the functions for optimal utilisation of the limited resources for better delivery of service to the people,” she said.

“Among others, a decision was taken to return some of the current investigators, who were temporarily transferred to the national office under the National Specialised Investigation Team (NSIT) to their respective provinces and to decentralise the team to capacitate the provincial offices.”

She said the bulk of Ipid’s detective work was done in the provinces, with Gauteng, the Western Cape, the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal being “hotspot provinces where the work cannot be handled by the current available team of investigators”.

Cola said during meetings with NSIT members, it was established that their workload was far less than that of their colleagues based in the provinces, “which is unjustifiable and may result in unfair labour practice”.

“Some of these officials were originally employed and stationed in the provinces, hence they are being returned.”

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