Secured Electronic System for Safe Police Case Records Management to Support Judicial Judgments in South Africa

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to investigate a secure system for the proper management of police case records to support judicial judgments in South Africa. The objective of the study was to establish a secure system for proper management of police case records to support judicial judgements in South Africa, determine the security of records on the system during creation and management, find out the kind of system for records creation and management, and identify participants’ education and experience. Manual paper-based records management has always been the cause of many problems in the entire judicial system in Africa, such as causing a delay in finalising some cases, or some cases being closed or dropped due to a lack of or unavailability or accessibility of required evidence. The study applied a qualitative approach to employ an interview data-collection technique to collect qualitative data from a purposively sampled population based on the knowledge and experience acquired by candidates as senior officers in nine police stations under the Tshwane Municipality in Gauteng Province of South Africa. The findings revealed that police stations are still utilising or applying a manual mode of records management with records created and managed in a paper-based format. The study presents a proposed framework that will help policing institutions across the world in the benchmarking development of their secure electronic system for safe police case records management to support judicial judgements in their countries.