Ian Cameron: 1,8 million citizens abandoned on “stone-age lines of hope”

When Dunoon residents called 10111 for help, the call dropped and four people were necklaced within hours. Ian Cameron, chair of Parliament's police committee, went looking for how often that happens. The acting police minister's answer: nearly 1.8 million abandoned calls in a single year, from centres that cannot even see where a caller is. Cameron told Chris Steyn why some centres lose more than half their calls, why the City of Cape Town's offer of help keeps going nowhere, and why he now doubts the forensic work on the Ekurhuleni murders, where the minister could not say whether DNA testing was done. He also argued the fixes are far simpler than SAPS makes them look.