Andy Duffy
More than 530 people died at the hands of the police in the last nine months of 1997.
Early investigations pinpoint police negligence as a main cause of the deaths, though the police watchdog, the Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD), has also found evidence of murder and culpable homicide.
The ICD’s figures show that nearly 160 people died in custody or as a result of police action in Gauteng in the nine months; 154 in KwaZulu-Natal — with 20 deaths in that province in December alone. Another 58 died in the Eastern Cape over the nine months, and 48 in the Western Cape.
The death rate of two a day during these nine months suggests the toll for the full year was around 730 — more than triple the official police figure for 1995.
The ICD, set up last April to investigate complaints against the police, says it is swamped by its work on deaths. “A lot of them are because the police are not properly trained, a lot is poor management,” says the Western Cape ICD regional head, Riaz Saloojee.
“If procedures were followed, a lot of these deaths could have been avoided … It would appear the bulk of the [investigations] show negligence at the very least.”
National Police Commissioner George Fivaz’s office declined to be drawn at the time of going to press on whether he has discussed the death rate with his provincial commissioners, or whether it merits any special inquiry.
Communication services head director Joseph Ngobeni says every case where police shoot is investigated, even when the victim is not killed.
“It would be dangerous to assume all cases of shooting [by police] are unlawful,” he adds. “Every case is dealt with on merit, given the difficult circumstances the police are sometimes faced with, and that they have to decide in a split second whether or not to discharge their firearms.”
But Saloojee says the ICD’s investigations suggest police resort to force too quickly, despite the legal stipulation that they exercise the minimum necessary force.
In one case, police in Grassy Park in the Western Cape shot a petty thief in the back of the head after he tried to escape by merely walking out of their charge office.
“A lot of the police are trigger-happy,” Saloojee adds. “You can’t help but speculate about whether people aren’t just taking the law into their own hands, acting as executioners.”
ICD executive director Neville Melville says the directorate’s Gauteng office has sent recommendations on several of its investigations to the Gauteng attorney general. The KwaZulu-Natal attorney general is prosecuting three people for murder following an ICD investigation late last year. The ICD’s Western Cape branch will hand its first recommendations to Attorney General Frank Kahn later this month.
The cases include the death of a 16-year- old Cape Flats youth, Angelo Asia, last June. He was arrested in Elsies River, spent a few hours in a police cell and died the next day in Tygerberg Hospital. His skull had been split from the nape of his neck to his eyebrows. The six officers involved in his arrest deny any wrongdoing. Other witnesses contradict their denials.
The ICD was forced to call in its own independent pathologist as part of its probe, because the state pathologist’s report had merely recorded the cause of Asia’s death as a head injury.
Ngobeni says the directorate is helping the police “achieve our goal of replacing a human-rights violation culture with a culture of respect for human rights”.