TIM FLACK | Gadget on a cop’s gun gained’t cease weapon theft

I’ve carried a firearm every single day for 10 years. I served within the navy. I sat on the neighborhood policing discussion board in Stellenbosch. So when a telecoms firm proposes {that a} GPS gadget clipped to a weapon will clear up the disaster of police firearms flooding South Africa’s felony underworld, I don’t want a brochure to know it’s promoting a fantasy.

Gugu Lourie wrote a column within the Sunday Times that reads like a Vodacom investor presentation. The thesis: SAPS loses 1000’s of firearms yearly, and the answer is to connect IoT monitoring units, manufactured by a Vodacom subsidiary, to each state-issued weapon. The product is known as a Peacemaker.

More than 3,400 SAPS firearms had been misplaced or stolen between 2019 and 2024. Only 559 had been recovered. Of 170 weapons that vanished from police armouries, 16 had been discovered. Twenty-nine thousand rounds of state ammunition disappeared in six months.

On this a lot, Lourie and I agree. Where we half firm is on the character of the issue. Lourie sees a technological hole. I see an institutional collapse. And one doesn’t repair a collapsing establishment by giving it a brand new gadget.

We are being requested to imagine that an establishment that can’t procure pistols with out scandal will seamlessly roll out IoT monitoring units throughout its whole arsenal.

Peacemaker is a Picatinny rail attachment. The customary SAPS sidearm for many years has been the Vektor Z88, which doesn’t have a Picatinny rail. SAPS has been transitioning to the Beretta Px4 Storm, however this procurement has been dogged by the identical corruption that characterises every part else the police service touches.

The auditor-general discovered that SAPS’ irregular expenditure elevated by 140% within the 2024/25 monetary yr alone. We are being requested to imagine that an establishment that can’t procure pistols with out scandal will seamlessly roll out IoT monitoring units throughout its whole arsenal.

A tracker on the rail means the officer can not mount a torch or laser sight. You are asking a police officer to decide on between seeing at nighttime and being tracked by his commander. And a Picatinny mount is held by a locking lever or thumbscrew, designed to be removable.

“Tamper detection” means the system tells you somebody eliminated the machine. It doesn’t stop elimination. The tracker studies its personal detachment, at which level you realize the firearm has been stolen. What you have no idea is the place it has gone.

Assume each SAPS firearm is fitted with a Peacemaker. You now have a centralised cloud platform monitoring each armed police officer in actual time. Lourie presents this as an unqualified good. It is a high-value intelligence goal. Global IoT hacking runs at roughly 820,000 assaults day by day. In a rustic the place the top of crime intelligence has testified earlier than parliament that “almost the entire Gauteng SAPS is working for the cartel”, the idea that such a platform would stay safe is delusional.

Consider how police firearms truly disappear. The Institute for Security Studies has documented officers renting their service weapons to criminals. A former SAPS colonel, Christiaan Prinsloo, stole and offered roughly 2,000 firearms to Cape gangs, linked to over 1,000 murders and 1,400 tried murders. This was corruption so systematic it amounted to state-sponsored arms dealing. The system can “flag unusual patterns”. Flag to whom? To the identical command constructions that presided over 3,400 misplaced firearms in 5 years?

Layering costly know-how onto a rotten basis produces a costlier rotten basis

Lourie’s piece additionally mentions, virtually as an afterthought, that “Peacemaker can also be used to track licensed firearms”. A quiet extension from state weapons to civilian weapons. The authorities’s personal 2015 evaluate described the Central Firearms Register as “technically collapsed, institutionally incoherent and incapable of maintaining accurate records”.

What Lourie is proposing is an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure over 1.8-million lawful residents, administered by an establishment that can’t preserve its personal weapons out of the palms of murderers.

The know-how the SAPS truly wants isn’t a GPS chip. It is a functioning central firearms register. It is an inside affairs equipment that investigates officers who steal and promote state weapons. It is a ballistics system that works. It is integrity testing of senior officers. It is the political will to behave on what the system already is aware of.

South Africa doesn’t lose 3,400 firearms in 5 years as a result of it lacks monitoring units. It loses them as a result of the establishment entrusted with these weapons is complicit of their disappearance. Layering costly know-how onto a rotten basis produces a costlier rotten basis. No quantity of IoT connectivity will repair that.

• Flack is a strategic communications guide primarily based in South Africa. He has labored in communications for the firearms foyer in South Africa for 10 years.