Phiyega at odds with experts over police capabilities

POLICE commissioner Riah Phiyega yesterday disagreed with an international law enforcement expert who submitted a statement to the Marikana Commission of Inquiry that the police personnel at the mine had been out of their depth and were forced to act beyond their capability levels.

Gcina Malindi SC, for the South African Human Rights Commission, read some sentences from police expert Cees de Rover, which stated that incidents at Marikana on August 16 alone caused 34 deaths as a result of the crowd management operations implemented by the police. Mr Malindi said Mr de Rover had also said he would place the operation at Marikana at the very end of the scale with regard to the police’s capabilities in crowd management. Gen Phiyega said his statement had to be read in context.

She read a statement from Mr de Rover saying: “The basic structure of the operations implemented at Marikana is the same as those implemented at 18,341 operations prior to Marikana.”

Gen Phiyega said: “The expert asks why did the South African Police Service not produce the experience-based results.

“That paragraph said to me that it was unprecedented.”

Mr Malindi said the Human Rights Commission would argue that “the deaths (and) serious injury recorded was as a result of poor planning, poor execution with a disastrous outcome”. Gen Phiyega said she disagreed.

Mr Malindi referred Gen Phiyega to the submission to the Marikana commission made by the police service in which it stated that “policies of crowd control and management have proved inadequate to control this situation”. He asked whether she agreed with this statement.

Gen Phiyega said the situation was unprecedented.

Mr Malindi also quoted a statement by another expert, who characterised police actions at Marikana as a “disastrous operational outcome”.

Mr Malindi asked Gen Phiyega whether she agreed with that finding, and she said she would say not without understanding what the expert meant by “disastrous operational outcome”.

Mr Malindi said the operation was disastrous because in the period between August 9 and 16, 44 people were killed in circumstances where the police could have managed the situation differently and minimised the number of deaths and injuries. “The goal of crowd management is to manage the situation with no loss of life and serious injuries. Do you agree the handling of the situation was disastrous?”

Gen Phiyega said she did not agree with the concept of disastrous operational outcome.

The commission continues.