More than a half a million arrested in 'Operation Shanela' last year, brags Cele

In a show of force, police minister Bheki Cele on Monday proudly announced that police had successfully arrested more than half a million people in 2023 as part of their nationwide Operation Shanela programme.

Giving the specifics, Cele said between May 2023 and May 2024, 616,423 suspects were detained across the country, with about 21% of those being “wanted” suspects. 

“A year since the inception of Operation Shanela, SAPS remains intentional in its approach to fight crime. The SAPS remains unapologetic in its decisive stance to fight crime and criminality. The role of active citizen participation in the prevention and combating crime continues to gain momentum,” Cele said.

Authorities held 71,576 operations each week from Thursday to Monday, headed by the provinces’ police commissioner.

Topping the list of crimes with the most arrests is assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm with 70,151. This is followed by arrests for possession of drugs, which stood at 51,857 suspects. Arrests of illegal immigrants accounted for 45,068, and 87,782 arrests were made for other crimes.

“We have had a number of seizures and recoveries during operations. We have had 49,276 explosives which were recovered during the operation. We have had 22,525 firearms made up of handguns, homemade guns and rifles which were confiscated. A total of 89,360 ammunitions we recovered during Shanela,” said SAPS component head of national operations coordination Maj-Gen Mashadi Selepe.

Component head of criminal investigations service Maj-Gen Rennie Mogale explained what happened to some of the suspects who were arrested by detectives.

From the detectives' side, 175,864 suspects were arrested across categories of contact offences, property-related offences, contacted-related offences and other serious offences. A total of 130,680 of those remained in custody during the assessed year.

“Contact offences include murder, attempted murder, rape, common robbery, assault GBH, common assault, house robbery, business robbery, carjacking, truck jacking and cash-in-transit heists. Since the inception of Shanela, a total of suspects arrested was 113,889, whereby 82,345 were in custody in that period and 16,947 were released on SAPS 496 (on warning),” said Mogale said.

The rest were either released on prosecutor bail or police bail, had to pay a penalty while admitting guilt or were released while issued a court summons.

Of the property-related crimes including residential burglary, business burglary, theft of motor vehicle, theft out of motor vehicle and livestock theft, 13,334 people were arrested. Thirteen-thousand and thirty-six remained in custody while 52 were released as they were minors, said Mogale.

“Contact related offences like arson and malicious damage to property — we had a total of 16,006 arrests and 11,478 were in custody in that period … The other category is other serious offences like shoplifting. Thirty-two thousand, six-hundred and thirty-five suspects were arrested, 23,821 were in custody, and 2,000 were minors,” he said.

Cele said the operation would continue across the country. Meanwhile, SAPS top management, including national commission Gen Fannie Masemola, will meet weekly to discuss policing crime.

He said the operation is a success due to collaborative work between various sectors and government departments. These include the SA national defence force (SANDF), national and provincial traffic police, metro police departments, municipal traffic, the department of home affairs and the SA Revenue Service (Sars).

“The role of active citizen participation in the prevention and combating crime continues to gain momentum. The community policing forum and community patrollers, as well as private security have been very active in their support and are playing a crucial role in the overall success of Operation Shanela,” said Cele.