The Death of Police Officers at The Scene of Incident: A New Approach within The South African Police Services Response to Crime

Policing encompasses a multitude of diverse tasks, including peacekeeping, criminal investigation, traffic control, and providing emergency medical service. Being a law enforcement officer is to engage one’s own life to save the state and its citizens, to ensure the safety and security of the people and to ensure people are respecting the rules and regulations that govern the country including its constitution and the Bill of rights. The significance of this study is to analyze the circumstances in which police officers are killed by examining their tactics used to respond to the scene of the incident and suggesting new approaches that can help in preventing the loss of manpower within the law enforcement structure. The study used a qualitative secondary data approach to generate data with a systematic method for data analysis. The findings reveal that the proliferation of firearms in South Africa, the suspect’s perseverance in violence, suspect protection, and defense are some of the causes of the killing of the police officers on duty. This study suggests that the interventions of law enforcement officers should depend on the type or nature of the crime. A violent crime that involved murder should be attended to carefully to neutralize or incapacitate the suspect by all means. Intelligence-led policing involving ununiformed members of the community, the zero tolerance and community policing approaches must be applied to curb or prevent the killing of on-duty law enforcement officers.