The traffic police officer who blew the whistle on the “dog cops” says he has been the target of threats and derision, but would do it all again, reports Khadija Magardie
Johan Venter remembers the smells of a braai wafting through the yard of the Brakpan house he had driven to with a colleague on the muggy December afternoon in 1999.
His colleague was excited and, though in a stomach-churning way, so was he. A line of cars, their blue and white markers indicating they were official police vehicles, were parked outside.
He also remembers the barking of what sounded like at least three big dogs, coming from the backyard. The house belonged to a member of the North East Rand dog unit of the South African Police Service (SAPS) who was hosting a get-together.
Several fellow dog unit officers were there with their patrol dogs. As they walked in, Johan’s colleague shouted out in Afrikaans to his brother, out back: “Kom wys vir Johan hoe fok julle die kaffers op [Come and show Johan how you guys fuck up the kaffirs]!”
Venter knew what he was going to see. Rumours had been floating around of videos of police dogs tearing into unarmed suspects. The policemen who regularly visited his wife’s coffee shop after work were always talking about it, loudly, almost bragging. Now he would finally see it.
Minutes after the tape was popped into the video recorder, Venter told the men he had seen enough. But they kept goading him on.
When the screams on the tape eventually subsided, the policemen stopped laughing and drifted off. In the split-second Johan was left alone, he snatched the tape from the room divider and put it into his jacket pocket.
His motive was not philanthropic. Earlier that year an official video camera signed out to him was mysteriously “stolen”. The matter was reported and all but forgotten, until one afternoon when he had to visit the same colleague, who was off sick he spotted the camera in the lounge. His colleague admitted stealing the camera, saying he used it to tape “dog training exercises”.
“They’re nice fun” the man told him, promising to let him watch them one day.
“I remember thinking that if this comes out I can prove it had nothing to do with me,” Venter recalls. But getting the tape investigated proved a problem. One policeman simply told him: “That’s big shit, destroy it.”
Eventually someone suggested he sell the tape to the media.
Then the threats came. People started calling him, warning they knew he had the tape. Venter says he began to fear for his life. A call to the South African Broadcasting Corporation eventually put him in touch with Special Assignment. He was reluctant to release the footage because he feared it would cause “racial tension” in the country. But he eventually did, for R50 000.
Venter says he did not do it for the money, which soon ran out when he, together with his wife and three daughters, had to flee to the Western Cape after the footage was aired and the death threats became more serious.
And the cost has been heavy.
He was not really put under a witness protection programme, but was shunted from place to place throughout the months away.
“I was always told that somebody would get back to me, which never happened,” he says.
Back at work earlier this month, he was informed an investigation against him was pending for, among other things, the stolen video camera and his absence from work. He has not resumed duties as a traffic inspector since he came back.
“You can sit and drink tea for all I care,” one of his superiors allegedly told him.
Though he faces derision from his white colleagues, Venter says the support from blacks over what he did has been overwhelming. “People stop me to shake my hand and congratulate me, even some I don’t know.”
Venter says he would do it all again if he had to, especially if the crime was race-related. Asked whether he saw himself as a hero, Venter is pensive: “I know what I have done was the right thing, because at least things like this will never happen again.”
Last month four of the policemen, Jacobus Petrus Smith, Lodewyk Christiaan Koch, Robert Benjamin Henzen and Eugene Werner Truter, were found guilty on three charges each of aggravated assault, and sentenced to prison terms of four to five years. The trial of their two colleagues who pleaded not guilty, Nicolaas Kenneth Loubser and Dino Guiotto, will be in June next year.