Ramaphosa urged to address discord in SAPS after Vearey’s axing
THE provincial ANC says it has written to President Cyril Ramaphosa calling for him to urgently address the divisions within the police service.
This comes after the dismissal of the provincial head of detectives, Jeremy Vearey, who was found guilty of misconduct over “disrespectful” posts on social media.
ANC provincial spokesperson for community safety, Mesuli Kama, said the party had also called for stability in the leadership and management of the police.
Kama said the news of Vearey’s axing had been met with shock and sadness.
“He was a hard-working officer who dedicated his life to fight for the protection of the masses of the people and for the safety of the communities,” Kama said.
He said Vearey was feared by gangs and revered by his colleagues and that his departure would be a great loss for the people of the Western Cape.
The Cape Argus tried to contact Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, Tyrone Seale, however, he did not respond by the time of publication.
Vearey was fired over Facebook posts allegedly aimed at National Police Commissioner Khehla Sitole.
He was charged with bringing the police service into disrepute with eight posts, between December last year and February this year, containing links to media reports.
Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (Popcru) spokesperson Richard Mamabolo said the union supported Vearey.
Mamabolo said Popcru had referred the matter to the Safety and Security Sectoral Bargaining Council.
“We will be making a dispute in terms of procedural and substantive fairness,” Mamabolo said.
Good party secretary-general Brett Herron said the police should stop fighting among themselves as thousands of people in the province lived in the shadow of gangsterism.
He said police officers and lawyers were being assassinated, and it felt as if the entire criminal justice system was on its knees.
“In this environment the politicisation of policing is dangerous and must stop. Policing in the province, and in the city in particular, is a hot mess,” he said.
Parliament’s police portfolio committee chairperson, Tina Joemat-Pettersson, said the committee had requested a formal report on the matter.
THE dismissal of the Western Cape’s head of detectives, Jeremy Vearey, has once again emphasised the rot that exists within the SAPS.
Vearey, a former Umkhonto we Sizwe guerrilla who was imprisoned on Robben Island, became one of Nelson Mandela’s bodyguards and was integrated into the National Intelligence Agency, the predecessor to the State Security Agency, in 1994.
In 1996 he joined the SAPS where he was forced to work alongside some of the police officers who had hounded him in the 1980s. His axing last week was allegedly over his Facebook posts, which the police’s senior management deemed to have been targeted at under-fire National Police Commissioner General Khehla Sitole.
This was not Vearey’s first clash with national police management. In 2016 he and former SAPS national Crime Intelligence boss Peter Jacobs were unceremoniously removed as deputy provincial commissioners for the Western Cape and demoted to cluster commanders. They took their case to the Labour Court and won reinstatement, but this would not be the end of their troubles.
Jacobs, who was moved from his position as the head of National Crime Intelligence, recently won an interdict against national police management, blocking them from starting a disciplinary hearing over the assassination of former Anti-Gang Unit commander Charl Kinnear, who was killed in September last year.
Police management alleged that Jacobs failed to act on warnings that Kinnear’s phone had been tracked by underworld figures. Sitole is also under the microscope as President Cyril Ramaphosa mulls whether to launch an inquiry into his fitness to hold office after a complaint by Police Minister Bheki Cele.
Some would suggest that Vearey is a victim of a factional power struggle within the SAPS between Cele and Sitole. But while senior police management have been at loggerheads, and some of the drama has played out in courts, South Africans have been suffering. Two weeks ago 13 people were killed in cold blood on the streets of Khayelitsha. The daily murder rate stands at 58, and while there are many variables, this can never be tenable and we demand that police take seriously the fight against crime instead of the preoccupation with factional battles.