With the festive season regarded as heist season, police are bracing themselves for a growing headache: their own members acting as bounty hunters.
According to senior police sources, the drive to catch heist kingpins as soon as possible — preferably within 48 hours after the heist — arises from the prospect of robbing the robbers before they have had time to stash their loot. This would result in a win-win situation for both law enforcement — which gets its perpetrators —and the individual investigators.
This week three members of the Johannesburg serious and violent crimes unit, Captain Ravichandra Naidoo, Inspector Madimalo Kgathi and Inspector Sathisagren Govender, appeared in the Johannesburg Regional Court following allegations that they had stolen cash from robbers or suspects they were investigating.
According to the charge sheet presented to the court the three confiscated R10-million worth of jewellery from a Randburg, Johannesburg, family involved in the jewellery business but only returned jewels worth about R7,5-million.
In January last year they searched a house in Randburg, purporting to be looking for a stolen BMW. The complainants claim R95 000 and $5 000 in cash went missing.
Last November the three tracked down robbers who had pulled off a R10,9-million foreign currency heist to a house in Lenasia. They found the money still in boxes, but R6-million in forex was never returned. In September this year the three arrested robbers involved in a heist at Montecasino, but of the R23-million stolen, R4-million could not be accounted for.
The case was postponed to February 11 next year and bail was extended.
The properties, including cars, bank accounts and insurance policies, of the three policemen have been provisionally forfeited to the state pending the outcome of the criminal case.
The asset forfeiture unit alleged that the men lived opulent lifestyles that were not commensurate with their earnings.
The official word from police headquarters is that the arrested policemen represent an isolated case.
The Independent Complaints Directorate says it has never ”formally received complaints of this nature. It has just been wild allegations from those who themselves were arrested for cash-in-transit heists about being robbed of their loot by the police,” according to spokesperson Steve Mabona.
He says the directorate had received reports about police robbing robbers, but the complainants did not always pursue the charge, leaving the police watchdog body with no alternative but to drop the investigation.
According to Gareth Newham, researcher for the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, it is known within the police that some of their colleagues rob robbers but the incidence is highly under-reported.
”It is part of the broader corruption within the SAPS,” says Newham.
He says reports from Britain and the United States show that the phenomenon of cops robbing their targets is not just a South African problem.
The so-called ”blue code of silence” — an unwritten rule that police do not rat on their colleagues at the risk of being stigmatised — plus the fact that the victims were themselves criminals contributed to the under-reporting.
Newham says the English experience relating to this type of corruption shows that the police need proactive and intelligence-driven investigation to root out this type of graft.
In South Africa the state is fighting back. National Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi last year established a specialist task team aimed at cracking down on serious and violent crime, including any person aiding and abetting individuals involved in such crimes.
Parliament has passed legislation, the Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act, aimed at tightening the screws on the beneficiaries of corrupt activities.
Section 23 of the Act empowers the national director of prosecutions to investigate any person who ”maintains a standard of living above that which is commensurate with his or her present or past known sources of income or assets”.
It also targets any person who ”maintains such a standard of living through the commission of corrupt activities or the proceeds of unlawful activities”.
The Act criminalises the inability to explain how one got one’s wealth if it is clear that it could not have been through a known source of income.
National police spokesperson Sally de Beer says there are mechanisms in place, such as the anonymous forms, national hotline, Crime Stop and the service investigation line for police members to report instances of misconduct or corruption.