Scandals show police in turmoil in S. Africa
JOHANNESBURG — The job of the South African police is to fight one of the highest crime rates in the world. Instead, the force stands accused of contributing to it.
On Thursday, the release of a video showing uniformed police binding a taxi driver to the back of a police vehicle and dragging him — the man was later found dead in a police cell — shocked South Africans long accustomed to stories of police misconduct.
At a bail hearing for Oscar Pistorius last week, a magistrate harshly criticized a police detective for shoddy work in the investigation into the murder case against the double-amputee athlete, who is charged with killing his girlfriend.
And last year, police fired into a crowd of striking miners, killing 34 in a convulsion of violence that reminded many of the worst excesses of the apartheid era.
These high-profile episodes cap a steady flow of allegations of police misconduct, whether in top rank corruption, prosecutions of officers charged with murder and rape, or numerous anecdotes of police pulling over drivers and demanding bribes. Many South Africans mistrust the very institution that is supposed to protect them, and the scandals weaken efforts by South Africa to project itself as a model country and a leader by example in sub-Saharan Africa.
“They are there for safety, but we as a people fear them more,” said Alfonso Adams, a resident of Johannesburg. “You don’t know who to trust anymore.”
The Daily Sun, a South African newspaper, posted footage of the dragging incident, which occurred Tuesday and was apparently filmed by several people using cellular telephones.
By some accounts, taxi driver Mido Macia, 27, of Mozambique drew the attention of police when he parked in a way that blocked traffic, and then got into an altercation with officers.
It remains to be seen whether the succession of scandals will trigger such a groundswell of public outrage that the government will push through reforms to the troubled police. Rape has been a scourge of South African society for many years, but sexual violence remains endemic despite periodic outcries. In the case of the taxi driver who was dragged behind a police van, officers paid little heed to the crowd that gathered, suggesting a sense of impunity has taken hold in police ranks.
Johan Burger, a former police veteran and a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, said the force rapidly expanded from 120,000 to almost 200,000 over the past decade, largely neglecting the quality of personnel that it recruited.
“It is like trying to fix a runaway bus going downhill,” he said.