Only political will can help rid police service of corruption
HAVE you ever imagined a situation in which a motorist disobeys a police instruction to pull over? Upon probing, you establish that it is simply because the motorist has no readily available cash to satisfy the officer’s wishes and wants. This may sound like fiction, but it is true.
The recent Global Corruption Barometer results released by international watchdog body Transparency International paint a gloomy picture of corruption in South Africa.
The results show that a number of institutions in South Africa are believed to be corrupt.
Most disturbing is the fact that the most important institutions in dealing with crime – the South African Police Service – is the worst culprit, with 83% of South Africans believing they are corrupt. This is alarming. The police are a very important institution: they are invested with awesome powers of compulsion. Borrowing from German sociologist Max Weber, they enjoy a monopoly of violence for they have the power to arrest, search, stop motorists and also to use physical force.
The paucity of effective measures to guard against the abuse or misuse of this monopoly power may lead to unbridled corruption within the police service.
But are accountability measures within the police service effective enough to stifle internal corruption?
The existence of police corruption is even more dangerous because those with financial muscle who are willing to pay can easily get away with murder.
With 36% of respondents admitting to having paid bribes to the police, one wonders what their transgressions were. Were some of them accused of serious crimes, such as rape, murder and hijacking?
The police service is the gateway to the criminal justice system. Offenders are first charged by the police before their appearance in a court of law. Those with the ability to avoid being charged by the police are assured a free pass.
Police organisations as big as the South African
Police service a key institution
Police Service and the metro police departments need effective oversight mechanisms to ensure accountability.
In the absence of dedicated anti-corruption and integrity units, corrupt and wicked police officers will continue to terrorise law- abiding citizens.
Unfortunately, the oncefeared and effective anticorruption unit within the police, the Scorpions, was dissolved under questionable circumstances.
The blame for police corruption can be laid squarely on the door of the police management and their political heads.
An effective and competent leadership would be expected to know how police corruption impinges not only on an ordinary man on the street, but the nation as a whole. If not arrested, police corruption can see citizens losing faith in the police and taking the law into their own hands.
Former police commissioner Bheki Cele once acknowledged that “we have been a zama- zama organisation. We have not been big on quality; we have been big on quantity.” Surely, where quantity is preferred over quality, the result is an organisation mired in controversy or lawlessness.
If nothing is done to turn the situation around, impervious police officials will continue to comport themselves as if police organisations are their own personal enterprises.
With political will, the police management can prove it is not prepared to preside over an organisation that is corrupt.
Dikgare is the director or Triangulation Security Advisory Services