With crime being South Africa’s most pressing problem, corruption within the police raises serious concern Piers Pigou At a recent conference in Cape Town on crime and human rights, the former South African ambassador to The Netherlands, Carl Niehaus, pointed out that the issue of dealing with incarcerated juveniles had not moved forward significantly since he left the country four years ago. Now national director of the National Institute for Crime Prevention and the Rehabilitation of Offenders, Niehaus said reading newspaper billboards on recent efforts to have juveniles taken out of prison gave him an uncomfortable sense of dj vu. Steven Friedman’s piece on why we need to control the police in last week’s Mail & Guardian evokes similar feelings. Since 1994 there has been questionable progress in many aspects of the police transformation. This process has been hampered by a number of factors including, among others, resource deficiencies, limited skills, personnel shortages, resistance to transformation and racism. This situation was further compounded by an apparent upsurge in crime and in particular violent crime. Crime fighting and prevention, however has also been seriously undermined by the prevalence of criminal conduct within the police service and the apparent inability to stop it. Almost every day the papers report more stories of alleged police criminality and misconduct. Last weekend’s papers for example included stories of: three Eastern Cape policemen who have been charged with culpable homicide, assault and attempting to defeat the ends of justice after allegedly running over and killing a teenager who was dragged behind a moving patrol car; a man who was allegedly abducted, assaulted and buried alive by members of the East Rand murder and robbery unit; a juvenile who was illegally locked up in police cells with adult prisoners and killed; a 16-year-old girl who is suing the police after being raped in police cells and infected with HIV by a police officer, who has since died of the disease; and a member of the police crime intelligence unit allegedly linked to a prostitute racket in Johannesburg. These are not isolated matters and according to Minister of Safety and Security Steve Tshwete there are at least 14E000 criminal cases against policemen and -women either before the courts or under investigation. More than 1E000 policemen have been charged with corruption since 1996. These are not just petty misdemeanours and include involvement in syndicate crimes, such as hijacking, car theft and murder. Criminality and misconduct is again in the limelight after the much publicised murder of African National Congress MP Bheki Mkhize by members of the KwaZulu-Natal public order policing unit, and other incidents, including the arrest and mistreatment of academic Xolela Mangcu and the racial insults hurled at the Northern Cape safety and security MEC by drunken police members during her recent visit to their police station.
Just how grave is the problem? The Human Rights Committee of South Africa says crime statistics for 1997 indicated that police officials are “almost three times more likely to be involved in criminal activities than members of the general population”. Of course not everyone accused of criminal actions or misconduct is guilty, but it would be foolish to deny the prevalence of criminality that exists across the country, including within the police. The logic of “if there’s no conviction, there’s no truth to the allegation” does not hold water. This was the position of senior police officers I spoke with during investigations into torture allegations in the Vaal Triangle in 1994 and 1995. Although 135 separate investigations in the Vaal resulted in 28 prosecutions and only a handful of convictions, it was evident to all those involved in the investigation that the problem was systemic. The suggestion that we are dealing with individual aberrations, or “rotten potatoes” as Tshwete describes the problem, fails to acknowledge that certain abuses and misconduct are widespread. The truth is that we do not know how bad the situation really is, although everything points towards a massive problem.
Six years ago I asked one of the deputy national commissioners how it was possible that the minister could provide globular annual statistics on specific crimes that police officers are charged with, yet they were unable to provide a breakdown of where these alleged crimes were committed and which units were implicated. He could not explain then and the police are still unable to provide this information, which in turn means that neither the safety and security ministry, nor the Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD) have any accurate picture of where criminality and misconduct is occurring, what types of issues are arising or which units, stations or districts are worst affected. If this is not clear, how can the police or the ministry effectively tackle the problem? There has been a considerable departure from the civilian oversight mechanism envisaged to investigate complaints against the police, as set out in Section 222 of South Africa’s Interim Constitution. This provided that an independent body would be established to investigate complaints about the police, which led directly to the inclusion of the provision to establish an ICD in Chapter 10 of the 1995 Police Act. It was originally intended that an independent investigative mechanism would be necessary, given the police’s historical predilection for violations, poor service and a lack of accountability. In terms of international experience, an independent mechanism was also advocated. Such a body was crucial as there is also no history of effectively and comprehensively dealing with criminality and misconduct within the police service, as evidenced from the abuses admitted to before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The visible foot-dragging and negativity from police and other officials in response to efforts by former Witwatersrand police reporting officer, advocate Jan Munnik, to expose some of the worst excesses and violations between 1993 and 1996 clearly illustrated that past habits were carried into the new dispensation. The responsibility for most investigations involving alleged police abuse, misconduct and other violations remains in the hands of the police itself. Investigations are under- funded, often uncoordinated and by and large do not receive the cooperation of other police members. The ICD does not have the capacity to oversee and monitor the policing agencies responsible for such investigations and consequently does not have a comprehensive overview of “in-house” criminality and misconduct, or where patterns of such behaviour have emerged. With limited resources itself, the ICD is unable to cope with 700-plus annual cases of deaths in custody or as a result of police action, which they are obliged to investigate in terms of the Act, let alone a plethora of other matters brought to its attention. Dealing with crime is without doubt one of South Africa’s most pressing problems. The apparent levels of criminality and misconduct within the primary crime-fighting agency, however, raises serious concerns about the nature of the strategy employed to deal with the overall problem. Criminality within the service was given all of half a page in the much-vaunted National Crime Prevention Strategy and the ICD has been systematically under-funded and receives a budget less than the amount spent annually on suspended police officers. It is shocking that six years on from the dawning of a democratic dispensation we still need to call for effective civilian monitoring of the police, as well as an independent investigative body that is given the same sort of support (logistical and otherwise) currently provided to the Scorpions unit. Instead we have a bellicose minister, diminished and weak civilian secretariats and an ICD that is not even able to spend its meagre annual budget. A serious rethink is required. Piers Pigou is a senior researcher based at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation. The views expressed here are his own