Perumal Naidoo: Top cop who failed to act on corruption
1953-2013
PERUMAL Naidoo, who has died aged 60, started as a policeman on the beat with a Standard 7 and rose to be the police commissioner of Gauteng.
He cultivated a tough, nononsense image, but he failed to stamp out corruption in his ranks, which reached epidemic proportions while he was in charge. He resented the media for their exposures, which, rather than the rot they exposed, seemed to offend his sense of dignity.
The SABC investigative programme Special Assignment invited him to a preview of a programme showing police extorting bribes from immigrants. Instead of commenting on the footage, as he had promised, he marched out of the studios in a rage with his entourage.
The programme showed how his men had turned the task of rounding up illegal immigrants into a lucrative, R90-million-a-year — according to the University of Witwatersrand Law Clinic — extortion racket. Two days after seeing the evidence, Naidoo had taken no action. The officers who were clearly implicated were still on duty.
Special Assignment, which Naidoo loathed, also exposed his men extorting bribes of at least R800 each from prostitutes and their clients. Naidoo demanded the footage and, when that was denied, refused to investigate the racket, which continued unchecked.
To jack up their arrests and make it look as if they were winning the fight against crime, his officers would regularly herd poor black people into their vans and take them to the police station, where they would be intimidated into paying R100 admission-of-guilt fines for loitering.
Police abuse of the vulnerable continued unchecked during Naidoo’s reign. When there were high-profile crimes, he would make suitably gungho statements and arrests would invariably follow.
When there was no publicity, he seemed uninterested.
Naidoo was born on January 22 1953 on a sugarcane estate in Umzinto, KwaZulu-Natal. Family circumstances forced him to leave school early. He joined the police at the age of 20 as a constable in Chatsworth.
He was moved to Gauteng as station commander of Daveyton township on the East Rand in 1996. He became deputy area commissioner of Johannesburg in 1998 and Gauteng commissioner in 2001.
He left the force in 2010 with a farewell party at the house of a notorious Hillbrow brothel owner, who praised Naidoo for making Hillbrow, a hotbed of vice and corruption, safer.
He retired after suffering a heart attack. He had a triple bypass operation, but was then diagnosed with colon cancer.
He is survived by his wife, Kanthy, and three sons. — Chris Barron