Two organisations came out against a merger of the Scorpions and the police in oral submissions at the Khampepe commission in Pretoria on Friday.
The Foundation for Human Rights (FHR) held that incorporating the Scorpions into the police service would be detrimental to South Africa’s ability to combat crime.
The Institute for Security Studies (ISS) submitted that the merger would simply not be worth the effort.
”Most of the reasons for setting up the Scorpions in its current form persist and … the price that might be paid for restructuring is simply not worth the effort,” ISS counsel Anthony Altbeker told the commission.
Headed by Judge Sisi Khampepe, the commission on Friday held its fifth day of public hearings into the future of Scorpions, which is at present the National Prosecuting Authority’s Directorate of Special Operations (DSO).
The DSO was established in 1999 amid concerns that police could not adequately deal with complex forms of organised crime and corruption. It teams up prosecutors with investigators and intelligence operatives to solve mostly syndicate and drug-related crimes.
Evidence before the commission was that the Scorpions had come to be seen as a powerful and effective response to these criminal threats.
However, the South African Police Service (SAPS) contended on Wednesday that there were constitutional impediments to the Scorpions operating outside the ambit of the police.
If the Scorpions were to gather keep and analyse information to the ends of prosecuting serious crime — which may constitute intelligence activities — the National Prosecuting Act should be amended to empower them to do so, Jay Govender, advocate for the inspector general of intelligence, added on Friday.
”Of real significance is that at the time of the formation of the DSO, the then minister of safety and security and national commissioner of police raised no such dire and legal concerns,” said the FHR’s counsel, Howard Varney. ”It hardly needs to be stated that the same Constitution and the same laws were in place then.”
Varney said that while the Constitution provides for only one police service, it places no restriction on the creation of investigative bodies outside the SAPS.
”There is no cause for the scaling back of crime-combating efforts. Most South Africans would be dumbfounded by such a prospect,” he said.
Tensions between the police and the Scorpions became evident in 2003.
Varney said there will always be a measure of tension between the Scorpions and the police and reminded the commission that a ”forced marriage is doomed to fail”.
The ISS has contended that the prosecution’s independence could be undermined if prosecutors — responsible for deciding whether to take cases to court — are made answerable to police officers.
While he conceded that the argument of police weakness no longer justifies the organisational separation of the DSO, Altbeker pointed out that the SAPS still has a problem attracting and retaining skilled professionals because its pay structures cannot compete with the private sector.
He has suggested that mechanisms be implemented to foster inter-organisational cooperation.
Relocating the Scorpions would not eliminate the problem, but simply shift the responsibility for dealing with it, Altbeker said.
The national intelligence coordinating committee had no position on the location of the Scorpions, but supported the notion of prosecution-led investigations, submitted its intelligence coordinator Barry Gilder. — Sapa