It’s remarkable how dumb those thugs are. Ministers promise that the police will “kill the bastards”, but the baddies just don’t get it. Every week there are “criminals” being shot dead because they “resisted arrest” and went for their guns.
Now and again the police accounts admittedly sound a tad dubious and there has been the occasional Oops! moment — like the three-year-old who was killed last year — but what the hell. Most of these deaths deservedly go unlamented by the great South African public and we can surely trust that the police watchdog is in control.
Actually, no. The watchdog is on its last legs, shuffling towards the euthanasia room.
A few years ago the then police National Commissioner, Jackie Selebi, called for the disbanding of the Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD) because it had “outlived its usefulness”. In the new South Africa the police could be trusted to monitor themselves, said Selebi.
Selebi was right. Not about the ability of the SA Police Service (SAPS) to monitor itself, but about the ICD’s usefulness.
The ICD has joined an array of Chapter Nine oversight institutions set up to secure SA’s new democracy, but which have subsided into ennui because the government has absolutely no intention of being constrained. Think of the toothless SA Human Rights Commission at which the African National Congress Youth League with monotonous regularity thumbs its nose; the spineless Public Protector who unabashedly covers government’s rear; the sonorously named but near-invisible Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities; and the vocal but hapless Commission for Gender Equality, which the ANC itself concedes is clueless.
Out of this array of ANC-commandeered institutions, it is the ICD that matters most to ordinary South Africans. The criminal charges that the erstwhile commissioner now faces are just the tip of a police iceberg of incompetence, unlawful killing, torture and corruption.
Poorly trained and often poorly led, the SAPS increasingly sees itself as above the laws it is supposed to police. Not a week goes by without another allegation of outrageous police brutality or incompetence.
Each year there are some 6 000 complaints against police officers, many involving claims of torture, rape, assault and unlawful death. In the year to March 2009, the cops shot and killed 556 suspects of which at least 32, it conceded, were innocent bystanders.
In 2008, according to an ICD statement hastily retracted for “audit and verification”, the directorate was investigating 830 law enforcement officers in KwaZulu-Natal alone, of which 174 involved deaths in custody. In the entire previous year only one conviction had been secured by the ICD.
The ICD, charged with the “effective and efficient” investigation of police misconduct and criminality, is clearly overwhelmed. It last issued an annual report in 2001. It only has half the staff that it is entitled to, but its website lists no vacancies.
There are fewer than a hundred ICD investigators and the SAPS routinely stonewalls their investigators. Bizarrely, SAPS officers are not compelled to call ICD investigators to a police killing, nor are they obligated to provide a statement in response to ICD inquiries.
Last year the Democratic Alliance managed to ferret out that around 90% of ICD recommendations to the SAPS are simply ignored. Of those that are acknowledged, the SAPS comply just over half of the time.
It is worth visiting the ICD’s doleful little website to view its plight. Its handful of media releases trumpet paltry successes — mostly drunken cops who shot their partners — all with the signature flourish of “we hope this will serve as a warning to other police officers that we will leave no stone unturned in ensuring that justice prevails in the end”.
No need to banish the watchdog, just let it starve.
The Police Independent Complaints Directorate site: www.icd.gov.za
Now just wait for the Harris and all the other ANC apologists to trumpet that it was also like this under apartheid and what did the whiteys (because of course its only the whiteys who weren’t clever enough to push off to Perth who complain.) The sad fact is that the ANC hasn’t made it any safer in S Africa for the ordinary man/woman in the street. Another issue is the police taking justice into their own hands because they are so tired of seeing hardened criminals returned to the streets because of our fouled criminal justice system, also entirely corrupted by the ANC
On the one occasion i had to refer police behaviour to the ICD for reasons that are not relevant here, the response was most satisfactory; and i certainly never got the impression that the ICD was a toothless bulldog.Perhaps the problem has more to do with the approach that the reality.
The whole problem is probably well under way at this time. Freedom of the press has to be stopped as it is what causes all the problems for the ANC and their useless and corrupt associates and departments. As soon as we don’t know what is going on, the sooner peace will return to South Africa. The ANC has to stop the press from reporting on things and the sooner the better – for them, but as most of our civil liberties are ignored they may as well ban all the opposition newspapers or set up ‘sensors’ to see to it that only the ‘good’ stuff is reported which will, of course make news casts and the newspapers very thin.
hahahaha, I found out who Dave Harris really is last week by chance..His skin is as black as mine but he poses as a whitey supporting the ANC to try and further his ramblings…I think I might send him some roses…
Dave Harris always seemed suspect to me. His rantings seemed to have a cultural bias. His grammar’s pretty good tho’.
I watched a clip on TimesLive about Fikile Mbalula promising a safe world cup. The top brass came across as a bunch of immature schoolboys who not only couldn’t express themselves properly, but can’t seem to identify by name, the “sophisticated new gear” they are purchasing for the police.
If the world cup is safe, it will have nothing to do with efforts of these bungling fools. The police are incompetent because those who lead them are even more so. They are crass and indisciplined, because their leadership are even more so.
Yes @harris is true to form, Runs when the truth is undeniable. Themba if that is true, mate then it just shows what lengths the ANC cadre will go to pull the wool over another’s eyes.
Shame poor guy that only way he can pass as a whitey he claims he hates so much. LOL. Just like old Lupinski married a black man but refuses to use his given name. Such a shame.
Many here could not believe that such a guilt ridden apologist of a white existed. Well not one in the ANC’s pay anyway.
That said I am fairly sure that the deaths in police custody are pretty well on the par with the past. A lot can be said about that.
So much for the much vaunted transformation. Hands up those who knew the transformation process as carried out would not work?
Now I wait that freezing day in hell when this government openly admits that it made a mistake at the speed at which it transformed everything.
One thing omitted is of course the disarmament of the public through various gun laws. Disband the Komando’s too helps to make the farming community vulnerable.
All this is classic Africa! Wake up and smell the mieliepap
“Safe world cup” ? The SAPS cannot even provide real safety for the local populace !
The number of ‘lost’ firearms from both the SAPS and our so-called Military is staggering, yet all that seems to occur is a ‘slap on the wrist’.