Appearing before Parliament last month, Police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi suggested that the time had come to close down the Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD), a watchdog agency set up in the first blush of democracy, when notions like civilian oversight of the police were in fashion.
Selebi says the ICD has outlived its usefulness and wants its functions handed back to the South African Police Service National Evaluation Service.
Given that the ICD’s function is to investigate deaths in police custody and as a result of police action, as well as the numerous allegations of serious crimes and acts of misconduct committed by police officers, Selebi’s views seem to some to mark a retreat from a commitment to democratic policing.
But Selebi is not wrong to question the functioning of the ICD in its present form. There is much that is wrong with the current system. One reason for this is that the ICD is hopelessly under-resourced to do the kind of work envisaged in its mandate.
That would be bad enough, but the fact that the independent oversight machinery is so ineffective means that police managers are often absolved from dealing with complaints that ought to be their responsibility. Instead, they can pass the buck to an agency so overwhelmed that it cannot deliver.
Suggesting that the current system is dysfunctional is not quite the same thing as endorsing the view that members of the ICD should be told to take their jackets and go, however. In fact, if the commissioner thinks about it, that scenario, pleasing as it might sound to his officers, is not in his, or their, best interests.
Entrusting the power of life and death to the police is not something that a citizenry should do lightly and, when it does, it should demand that systems are in place to make sure that cops who misuse those powers are brought to book. If these systems do not exist, the democratic credentials of the state itself are weakened.
One reason to entrust this task to independent agencies is that cops may be too understanding of their colleagues’ actions or insufficiently motivated to take matters to court when they believe them to have been at fault. Another is that the independence of the investigation helps ensure that the outcome is accepted by the public at large.
Neither of these arguments implies, however, that every single complaint is in equal need of independent investigation. And it is here that the ICD has gotten itself tied up in knots. Not only is it overloaded, by relieving police management of the responsibility for dealing with these complaints, the ICD has made police management less accountable than it might otherwise be.
Rather than drowning it in thousands of cases, it would be far better if the mandate of the ICD were reduced to cover only the most serious cases. Of course, it should investigate all deaths in custody or as a result of police action. These cases are too serious to leave the credibility of investigations in doubt. So too are all allegations of torture. Matters are much less clear in cases of alleged police criminality and misconduct, however, and most of these could be left to police managers who could be held accountable for dealing with their problem officers.
Contrary to the commissioner’s views, independent agencies like the ICD are not something only transitional societies need. But independent agencies that drown in their workload are no good to anyone, and the ICD’s mandate needs some serious rethinking.
Antony Altbeker is a research associate at the Institute for Security Studies. His book, The Dirty Work of Democracy: A Year on the Streets with the SAPS, has been short-listed for the Alan Paton award