‘Missing dockets are not a problem’

Being raped by her neighbour was an horrific ordeal for Angie*, a young woman who lives on the East Rand. But traumatised as she was, she was determined to make the perpetrator pay.

She gritted her teeth, went through all the medical examinations and told the tale of how a seemingly friendly encounter turned into a violent fight and sexual assault.

‘The police were sympathetic. They even spoke to me in my own language,” she says.

But then, a week before the court date, the police called her again.

‘They told me they would have to take my statement again and that of my friend who lived nearby,” she said. ‘It had been difficult to get my friend to say anything, because people don’t like to talk about these things.”

The docket had been lost. ‘They said they could not find it and that these things happen sometimes. They would simply just take my statement again.

‘I don’t know what happened to the medical evidence they took. I just decided at that moment that I had had enough.”

She dropped the charges to avoid more trauma.

The South African Police Service insists missing dockets are not that big a problem. Said Ronnie Naidoo, national police spokesperson: ‘The South African Police Service generates a very large volume of case dockets. In comparison to the very small numbers that do go missing for various reasons, the police do not consider the problem to have reached alarming proportions.”

Most dockets were lost at court or because of theft. Naidoo said official statistics on missing dockets ‘are not readily available”, saying that it would take a special project to generate them, which the SAPS would rather spend on service delivery.

The most up-to-date statistics date back to a 2004/05 government report — 373 dockets went missing in that period alone.

According to Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqakula, more than half of these dockets (209) were lost at police stations and 135 at courts, while 29 were stolen.

Yet community police forum members at the problematic Booysens police station told the Mail & Guardian that 80% of dockets at the police station went missing. The police station refused to comment.

And three years ago Greater Nelspruit Rape Intervention Project (Grip) claimed that 135 rape dockets went missing in their area alone. Mpumalanga’s police commissioner, Eric Nkabinde, admitted at the time that an unusually high number of dockets had gone missing, especially at KaNyamazane police station.

Since then, 32 detectives have been deployed to Ka-Nyamazane to tackle the problem. But Nkabinde admitted: ‘We’ve inherited a monster police station at KaNyamazane.”

Three years later, Grip’s Barbara Kenyon said the problem remained, despite slight improvement. Grip member Nokuthula Makhubela told the M&G that, through their intervention, they had managed to reduce the missing rape dockets in their operating area to one this year.

‘What we do is to immediately copy a rape docket. When it goes missing, we can simply replace it again with our own,” she said. ‘This seems to have solved the problem.”

The police station’s commander, Superintendent Micka Tlou, denied that the station was the problem. The real issue was the labyrinthine regional and district court system.

‘Sometimes people are quick to say that a docket is missing when it has gone through the referral process,” he stated. He said that, to prevent dockets from going missing, they always had duplicates on hand.

The docket of another rape victim, Boyiswe*, went missing several times in Tembisa before rape support group One in Nine intervened.

With outside help, she finally got her day in court this month.

In some cases, dockets appear to have become a commodity traded to supplement meagre incomes. Last year, National Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi acknowledged that corruption is sometimes to blame for the disappearance of dockets in criminal court cases. He told Parliament’s standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) that officials might be offered up to R25 000 to ‘lose” incriminating documents.

Jacob*, a constable stationed in Johannesburg, told the M&G that a hijacking syndicate had offered him R1 000 for the dockets of one of their members. ‘Policemen do not get paid a lot,” he said. ‘So, if you are offered an extra income, you might consider it.”

With an embarrassed laugh, the constable denied agreeing to the deal. ‘Just R1 000 to throw away your career?” he said, but then grinned: ‘Maybe if he had offered more —”

The National Prosecuting Authority admitted that missing or incomplete dockets were a major frustration. Spokesperson Lucinda Moonieya said dockets with missing documents had to be handed back to the investigating officer.

‘The prosecutor will write specific instructions for the investigating officer to investigate further. This is done in the investigation diary, which forms part of the police docket,” she said.

Moonieya added that the investigating officer and the unit commander had to take the responsibility for incomplete or missing dockets in police hands.

‘The unit commander is supposed to check the dockets before they can be forwarded to court,” she said.

Johan Burger, of the Institute of Security Studies, agreed that the station commander ultimately had to take responsibility for bad dockets.

‘There need to be checks and balances; in other words, command and control,” he said.

*Not their real names