Police ‘out of control’ – research
CRIMINAL officers are out of control and, despite research highlighting this problem three years ago, a weak police management was making no effort to stamp out unlawful activities within their ranks.
This is the findings of a research paper undertaken by the SA Institute of Race Relations’s (SAIRR) risk analysis unit. Broken Blue Line is the second of its kind and is set to be released in February.
The Sunday Tribune’s sister paper, the Weekend Argus, has an unedited draft copy, which details 100 crimes, including rapes and murders, allegedly carried out by police officers. It also criticises “weak” police management.
The report surfaced in the wake of three separate arrests of officers in the Western Cape, where an anti-corruption police unit became operational in September, in less than a week.
A Claremont detective was arrested on Wednesday for defeating the ends of justice for allegedly trying to suppress a case. The day before, a Bredasdorp constable was arrested for theft; four days prior to that, a constable, one of 11 officers from the Parow station arrested this month, was taken into custody for fraud.
The 2015 report follows a 2011 research paper with the same title which drew the ire of national police management at the time.
This week national police spokesman Solomon Makgale requested a copy from Weekend Argus before commenting, but the SAIRR asked that it not be distributed further.
Both the 2011 and 2015 reports involved examining a sample of 100 “serious and violent” crimes carried out by police officers.
The 2015 report focuses on the period from April 2011 to November. “After identifying the first 100 cases – which took about a week – we stopped looking for further cases…
“The fact that we could so easily identify 100 incidents – and for such a short period – would sugges South Africa continues to confront a massive problem of police criminality,” it said.
Of the 100 incidents the draft focused on, 36 related to rapes, 21 to armed robberies, 36 to murders and attempted murders and 16 to other types of crime.
The draft said the information available showed there was no significant change in the extent of police criminality compared with the 2011 report.
“That this pattern continues virtually unbroken since our 2011 report suggests that no new efforts have been made to combat the scourge of police criminality.
“If the police insist otherwise they have to concede that any such measures have been ineffective. In any event the fact that many serving officers have criminal records shows the lack of overall urgency in dealing with the problem of police criminality,” the draft report found.
It said the public had good reason not to trust the police. “It is unlikely to expect a significant turnaround in violent crime levels when the people charged with fighting crime are too often the perpetrators or closely associated with the perpetrators. This has significant implications for future crime fighting strategy.”
The draft, in a number of policy proposals, criticised police management and singled out national police commissioner Riah Phiyega. It proposed a new investigative body, within the Justice Department, be created “to actively seek out and prosecute corrupt officers”.