Developing the SAPS website for optimal service delivery

1 Introduction

All police agencies worldwide have a common purpose: To deliver effective service to the communities in which they are situated. Consequently police agency websites also aim for service delivery.

The South African Police Service (SAPS), too, in essence stands for service delivery. This is underlined by the SAPS national strategy (SAPS 2002a: 6), which emphasises the importance of providing service to its clients, namely the members of the South African public. This is in line with its own mission and with government strategy, which is very clear on the purpose of service delivery. It further embodies the Service Delivery Improvement Programme (SDIP) of the SAPS: “The primary goal is service to the public” (SAPS s.a.: 78). Recent research by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) at 45 of the 219 SAPS priority police stations indicates that most people who dealt directly with the police were satisfied with the services they received. This is in sharp contrast to general public perceptions of the police (ISS 2001).

The SAPS has a service delivery improvement programme (SDIP) that seeks to improve service delivery to communities at local level. The programme provides police station managers with practical tools to improve service delivery while seeking to inculcate a culture of participative management and increased community involvement. In this regard Groenewald (in North 1998:13) emphasises that an approach of ownership in development is important and that people should be empowered to take part in the process.

The SDIP also ties in with the South African government’s Batho Pele (“People first”) initiative to improve the delivery of public services. Improving service delivery is one of the government’s eight priorities as set out in the White Paper on the Transformation of the Public Service (cf. Department of Public Service and Administration 2002).

Service delivery within the SAPS includes determining and meeting the public’s information needs that pertain to safety and security and crime combating and prevention. The vision of the SAPS Information and Systems Management (ISM) Strategic Framework is “to enable the optimal use of information by the SAPS in creating a safe and secure environment for all people in South Africa” (SAPS 2002a).

In many respects, the SAPS service delivery sets an example. Multilingualism, for example, is regarded as important in the SAPS and the police agency endeavours to service members of the public in the language of their choice. In order to realise this, the SAPS launched a pilot project for the Telephone Interpreting Service for South Africa (TISSA) under Senior Superintendent Karen Calteaux in March 2002. The pilot project provides for immediate access to an interpreter in any of the official languages of the country via a landline and a speaker-telephone. TISSA – at the time of the pilot project – was available at 70 police stations across the country (SAPS 2002b: 26).

In the Communication Strategy of the government’s Justice, Crime and Security (JCPS) Cluster (which includes the SAPS), circulated in June 2002, the objectives include –

promoting a sense of security and safety in communities by communicating the efforts of the SAPS and government in implementing service delivery; and
informing and educating the public on the role, progress and campaigns of the SAPS and other departments in the JCPS cluster (JCPS Cluster 2002:7).

The SAPS website, one of the tools utilised to cater for the public’s information needs, was established in 1997. It has since grown to be a sizeable online publication. In July 2002 the content of the website was printed and it amounted to almost 2 000 A4 pages.

In line with the concept of “e-Government”, which is fast gaining recognition worldwide and in South Africa, it is important for the SAPS, as a government department, also to start looking into how its website could implement the relevant principles and deliver service this way.

e-Government is defined as “the use of information technology, in particular the internet, to deliver public services in a much more convenient, customer oriented, cost effective and altogether different and better way. It affects the Government’s dealing with its citizens, business and other public agencies as well as its internal business processes and employees” (Mwanza 2002).

To expand on this definition, Hoekman (2002) explains that e-Government aims at transforming the existing governance systems through digital means by increasing participation, efficiency and effectiveness in order to foster democracy and economic and social development. However, “e-Government is much more about transforming relationships than about technology. There is no smooth transition from ‘government’ to ‘e-Government’ (Di Maio 2001).