Outrage over police killings

Published Aug 8, 2015

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Thandi Muhlari removed the blanket covering her legs and showed her large, pregnant belly. Then, she broke down, sobbing quietly. Muhlari is seven months pregnant. And now that she is widowed, she contemplates having to raise this child on her own.

Her police officer husband, Norman, was looking forward to the birth of their second baby. But early on Thursday, the nursing student received the tragic news that would change her life.

Two criminals had shot him dead at the Stretford railway station in Orange Farm around midnight, wounding his colleague, who is fighting for his life in Milpark Hospital. They fled with the officers’ guns.

The Muhlaris had met in Khujwana, a Limpopo village, 15 years ago, where she fell in love with his smile and his easy way with people. “I loved the way he loved his family,” she added, looked fondly at Delwin, their seven-year-old mentally disabled, epileptic son. “Everyone he met liked him very much… As a policeman, he worked hard for us.”

She bowed her head solemnly, her hands covering her swollen eyes, as she sobbed.

So far this year, 55 police officers have been slain on duty - seven in the past two weeks alone.

But Gauteng MEC for Community Safety, Sizakele Nkosi-Malobane, who visited Muhlari on Friday, ranks this week among her worst.

She sought to comfort Muhlari in her grief, patting her back gently as she wept inconsolably.

“I hope your family will be strong and you will be able to deal with this pain,” she told her gently.

And as more police officers fall, the MEC’s visits to their bereaved relatives are becoming far too common.

“We come to see the families so they know they are not alone. When you see an officer in hospital fighting for his life, that’s also really hard.

“If you hear every day that one officer is down, or two officers are down, it affects me emotionally,” she said, her eyes filled with tears.

It has also affected Major General Michael Motlhala, the divisional commissioner of visible policing, who told the Saturday Star on Friday: “It hasn’t been an easy task in recent weeks when we’ve been woken up in the middle of the night to go and report to relatives that their loved ones are no more,” he said, adding police stations had a chaplain and psychologist on hand to provide counselling to members and families.

Still, he believed the scale of police killings did not yet represent a crisis.

“I don’t think the number of police killings at this stage points to a crisis, but we accept at this stage the figures of those killed have increased dramatically. For us this also has to be put in context.”

“During this period, we’ve launched many crime prevention operations in the country like Operation Fiela. This means therefore our members are everywhere daily and they are visible, which might result in the increased risk of being attacked by criminals.”

Motlhala said the police had a 10-point strategy to deal with the increasing number of officers being killed, which was linked to police safety and a policing plan.

This involved a multi-disciplinary approach with detectives, specialised units and flying squad members. “We have also roped in crime intelligence to get proactive measure to prevent more attacks on police on duty.”

He worried that members at the police station level were most vulnerable to attacks. “Part of the strategy is to review all their training and we have made it compulsory that officers must attend this training and refresher courses on tactical response to crime.

“One of the things we’ve now adopted as a matter of safety is to ensure when our officers report for duty they have all the necessary equipment and are emotionally ready for the job.

“In a police operation, we want to ensure while our members have a duty to protect people’s constitutional rights, their own rights to carry on the work is also equally protected.”

Gareth Newham, the head of the crime and justice programme at the Institute of Security Studies, said: “It’s always been a very dangerous job being a police officer in South Africa yet there has been an ongoing decrease in police being killed in the last 10 years.

“So the question we need to ask is why are these figures going up again? One big correlation we’re seeing is an increase in armed robberies.

“In 2014, there were 50 more armed attacks daily than there were in 2011. That’s possibly one of the key contributing problems to this police killing increase.”

Police intelligence had also deteriorated. Armed robberies, he said, were committed by a small group but a dramatic deterioration in the capacity of productivity of crime intelligence was to blame for their spike.

This was also because of leadership being “incompetent”. Newham said police management had introduced several initiatives in recent years to improve the safety of officers but most victims were being ambushed and “no training could prevent that”.

There has been a chorus of condemnation following the killing spree from community policing forums, the SA Human Rights Commission, Gun Free SA as well as President Jacob Zuma, who has suggested disarming South Africans.

The Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union called on the government to “implement stricter gun laws and harsher sentences” to help stop the police killings.

Matshidiso Seolwane, whose brother James Lesibana, 35, was killed after he and his partner responded to a business robbery in Tshwane last week, told the Saturday Star his two daughters, aged two and 11, asked her every day where he was. “They don’t know what’s going on and I don’t know what to tell them.

“I just cry. I want justice… to see the people who killed my brother punished.”

Meanwhile, Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) on Friday called on the Deputy Police Minister, Makhotso Sotyu, to retract her “derogatory and offensive remarks” during Lesibana’s memorial service earlier this week.

There, she told mourners: “Our strategic implementation plan must always intend to treat heinous criminals as outcasts, who must neither have (a) place in the society, nor peace in the cells! They must be treated as cockroaches!”

Saturday Star

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