South African Police Website Totally Busted!

After watching a TV show on the incompetence of the South African Police, I started wondering about the competence of other aspects of the Police force. So I logged onto their website (joking to myself that I'll probably be greeted by an out-dated web site with lots of dead links) and was astounded to find out that indeed half the website appears to be down!

check it out: http://www.saps.gov.za

When I tried to click on the Western Cape part of their map I got an error, then I tried clicking on the rest of the map and got errors. The whole of South Africa was an error!

I decided to complain and found a link on the front page labeled FEEDBACK stating:

"Interact with SAPS
Do you want to praise, complain, assist or talk to us? Click on this page:"

so I clicked on it - and guess what... nothing! I just got an error page!

You know that there's something HORRIBLY wrong when you can't even send an email to your NATIONAL POLICE FORCE!

I did manage to spot an email address near the bottom for crime stop in Gauteng, but that's like a thousand miles away from where I live.



then i dug a bit deeper in the website and managed to find the webmaster's email address - but then decided that it would be a waste of time emailing him because he probably hasn't figured email out yet.

I'm so disillusioned right now, I'm surprised I've actually written this far.

then for comparison I decided to check out the websites of another random third world country's police force to see how it compared. Maybe I was expecting too much from South Africa which is after all a third world country (that seems too be the most common excuse anyway) so I decided to try Argentina's Police Force website on for size. After about a minute I had found it (check it out for yourself: http://www.policiafederal.gov.ar/ ) and surprise surprise, it seemed to be in perfect working order with email address AND phone numbers clearly placed on the front page. This page was ten times more informative and it wasn't even in English!

So then I thought... why complain to the Police? Nothing will happen. Let me show the rest of the world (or at least the internet) and see what they think. Who knows, maybe you guys can even fire off an email or two to the (so-called) Webmaster of the South African Police Force (nortjew@saps.org.za) recommending a few improvements to their "site".

On a less pessimistic note... the reason why I went to the SA Police website in the first place, was because I had an idea about crime prevention using the internet, and I wanted to see if they had some sort of service where you could just fire off an email or something notifying the authorities of drag racing going on down your road (a daily occurrence) or really dodgy people walking around your neighborhood (an hourly occurrence). I think this is gonna make more sense as more and more people get online and less and less people are prepared to pay the exorbitant land line and cell phone prices.

We should be the police's eyes and ears on the ground, and attack crime in a distributed network type fashion. I bet if we all worked together we could almost totally eradicate crime. By the way, South Africa has got a SERIOUS crime problem. I live in what is considered one of the better suburbs in Cape Town and we live in a virtual prison scenario with layers and layers of security walls, laser beams, burglar bars, alarms and 24 hour private armed response patrols. And EVERYONE has high walls and electric sliding gates. And crime is still a big problem. I shudder to think how bad it must be in the townships.

Rant rant rant rant..... going to sleep.