Criminals are ‘infiltrating’ police

THE fight against corruption is costing police lives, deputy national commissioner Lieutenant- General Khehla Sithole told Parliament yesterday.

Briefing Parliament’s police oversight committee on steps being taken to stem the tide of police killings – already higher than the figure for last year, with 58 officers dead so far – Sithole said the police were “aggressively” tackling corruption but criminals were infiltrating their ranks in response.

Crooked cops were selling the details of their dedicated colleagues, including their home addresses, identities of their children and places they frequented so they could be killed by criminals.

In at least one high-profile case investigators had had to be protected by members of the Tactical Response Team so they could continue their work.

Sithole said criminals also studied police tactics – sometimes with the assistance of ex-cops – so they could anticipate their actions and counter them.

This was particularly true in the case of ATM bombings, Sithole said.

“When we look at how criminals attack us, it is clear they have been told how we operate.”

As a result the police had begun to profile ex-cops, especially those who had left the service because of their involvement in crime.

Another problem was the unstrategic siting of ATMs by banks, which would sometimes force police responding to a robbery to cross “risky” terrain to reach them.

Abandoned buildings were also used by criminals to ambush police, and the SAPS was in talks with municipalities to deal with this.

In one case criminals had waited at the top of an abandoned building for police to arrive, before shooting them from above.

In informal settlements, police sometimes had to leave their vehicles to respond to a complaint because there were no roads, making them vulnerable to attack.

Police were being cautioned to pay attention to where they stopped and not to talk on their cellphones or sleep in their vehicles as this made them easy targets, Sithole said.

Major-General Susan Pienaar, head of crime prevention in the visible policing division, said more police were killed off-duty than while on duty, but the police had not analysed whether they were proportionally more frequent victims of crime than the general population.

However, a task team had been set up to analyse the case dockets of murdered police to track patterns and establish whether they were being targeted for their weapons.