Five-year probe exposes dark underbelly of police

ON August 3 2010 a call comes through to our office. Mzilikazi picks it up.

“You’re going to arrest me! For what?” he says.

“That was a joke, right?” I say after he replaces the receiver.

With that call our roller-coaster ride began, taking us into the dark recesses of the police, deeper than either of us ever wanted to go. What we saw was not pretty.

Mzilikazi was arrested the next day. He later successfully sued the state for wrongful arrest.

Just days earlier we had exposed the then police chief Bheki Cele for instigating a dodgy real estate deal with a friend of President Jacob Zuma’s.

Immediately after Mzilikazi’s arrest, the phones started ringing off the hook. Disgruntled police officers from different divisions throughout the country contacted us with tip-offs ranging from top-level corruption to police brutality.

One of them involved what our informants called “a police unit gone rogue” controlled by KwaZulu-Natal Hawks head Major-General Johan Booysen.

They said the unit, based at the Cato Manor offices in Durban, routinely tortured suspects and had killed dozens of people in questionable shootings.

“The public is so gatvol of crime these guys think they’re untouchable,” said a senior Hawks officer with friends in the unit. “People don’t care if they execute criminals. As long as they get results.”

Coincidentally, human rights activists in KwaZulu-Natal contacted us around the same time with information about alleged atrocities committed by the unit.

In the past five years we have interviewed dozens of people from urban and rural areas in KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga and the townships around Johannesburg.

Their stories were heartbreaking. They saw posses of detectives armed with assault rifles marching down township streets in the dead of night, kicking in doors and interrogating suspects with pistols shoved in their mouths.

Some suspects were stripped naked at the Cato Manor offices and tortured with plastic bags or strips of rubber wrapped round their heads.

People told us how officers had burst into their homes and threatened to kill their loved ones, whose bullet-riddled corpses later turned up at the morgue.

Others present at shootings described how officers seized their unarmed husbands, brothers and fathers, and shot them.

In two cases we interviewed four people with no links to the dead suspects who witnessed executions in cold blood.

When we first published the allegations of a Cato Manor “death squad” in December 2011, the public backlash was fierce and sudden, and similar in tone to the reaction to the execution-style killing of Khulekani Mpanza this month.

Social media and radio talkshows were awash with “hang ’em high” sentiments, and police supporters wearing “down with cop-killers” T-shirts demonstrated outside the courts.

Commentators outside South Africa saw things differently. Many had expected tolerance, racial harmony, liberal values and respect for human rights to be hallmarks of Nelson Mandela’s rainbow nation.

The picture we saw and wrote about was somewhat different.

Apartheid security forces routinely tortured and murdered crime suspects and political prisoners. They got away with it because most of their victims were black.

These atrocities shouldn’t happen any more. But they do. We have spent five years inwith terviewing police sources, witnesses to executions, local and international researchers, torture victims and relatives of suspects who were shot or tortured to death.

We’ve pored over files stuffed with ballistics reports, autopsy results and police memos. We have watched police torture videos and sifted through hundreds of gruesome crime scene photos and “trophy” shots. We came to an unpalatable conclusion: police atrocities did not die apartheid — they are thriving in our new democracy.

We had always thought the interviews would have made for powerful TV.

Last year, the UK-based production company Insight: The World Investigates, invited proposals for films to be screened on Al Jazeera’s Africa Investigates programme.

After a lengthy interrogation of its factual basis, our proposal was shortlisted. We were invited to a workshop in Ghana, where we learned the ropes from legendary TV journalists like Sorious Samura, who was an adviser to the makers of Blood Diamond; Steve Boulton, the former editor of Granada TV’s ground-breaking World in Action; and Diarmuid Jeffreys, an executive producer at Al Jazeera English.

Our proposal was one of a handful to pass final muster. After the film was made, it was vetted by three law firms. It will be screened on Al Jazeera this week.

It tells the stories, in their own words, of those who have borne the brunt of police brutality and of officers who have turned whistleblower after seeing more atrocities than they could bear.

It will no doubt receive a response similar to those that greeted the Cato Manor exposé and the killing of Mpanza.

The prevailing mood is that criminals who are killed by police, even if it is murder, got what they deserved.

Anyone whose loved one was murdered instinctively wants revenge. But police officers should never be influenced by this emotional response.

The constitution is clear: everybody is innocent until proven guilty. Those officers who torture or kill suspects who do not pose a threat are guilty of a crime. They become no better than the criminals they are risking their lives to catch.

A fundamental pillar of a state governed by the rule of law is that arbitrary exercise of power can never be tolerated.

The law applies to everyone, rich or poor, weak or powerful, black or white, cop or criminal.

To forget this is to take a step towards tyranny, a society in which no one listens to your screams when you’re hauled off in the dead of night for some fabricated offence and tortured to death.

Arbitrary exercise of power can never be tolerated