TUESDAY, 4.30PM
THE Independent Complaints Directorate on Thursday released figures that show police killed 191 people during arrest or in custody in the first quarter of this year, compared to 226 deaths for the whole of 1995.
The new figure, if extrapolated, suggests that by the end of this year 764 people will have fallen victim to what the ICD called “class one” incidents — deaths in custody or during arrest, said ICD head advocate Neville Melville. The ICD’s statistics show that 56 suspects died while in police custody and 135 people were killed during arrest. Seven deaths in custody were as a result of natural causes, 16 people committed suicide in prison, 14 died from injuries sustained in custody, seven died from injuries sustained prior to arrest, and 12 died from what the report termed “possible negligence”.
The breakdown of suspects who died as a result of police action was given as: 73 shot during the course of arrest, one shot during the course of a crime, six shot during the course of investigation, 32 in “other intentional” shootings, and six as a result of “possible negligence”. Fifteen suspects died as a result of police action other than shooting.
Although police are legally required to report to the ICD all deaths in which police were involved, Melville said it is possible that there was a measure of underreporting — because of negligence or concealment. David Bruce, from the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation pointed to the climate of public outrage against crime as a possible cause for the number of deaths. “This has resulted in there being very little sympathy for criminal suspects and the possibility exists that even though the SAPS have tried to impose greater control on the use of firearms by police, the general climate has provided police with a greater sense freedom to shoot people,” he said. “Part of the reason must lie in the fact that there are a lot of heavily armed criminals out there, but that’s not the whole story. There exists a culture of shooting criminals.”