Cape Town - Police brutality is not a matter of isolated incidents and the work of rogue individuals, a policing expert says, but a systemic problem that can be fixed only by ridding the service of poor top management.
MPs agreed it was a “massive problem” that had resulted in the public fearing the police instead of trusting them.
Gareth Newham, crime and justice programme head at the Institute for Security Studies, was speaking after Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa briefed Parliament on the issue on Tuesday, amid a deluge of bad publicity depicting the police as violent and out of control.
Cope MP Mluleki George said there was a “perception” the police were “no different than the police that operated before 1994”. Discipline was unravelling and “the ethos of the police is gone, completely gone”.
Freedom Front Plus MP Pieter Groenewald, said: “The people don’t have trust in the police services. In fact, they fear the police services. They don’t know if they were a victim of crime that they can even go to the police station to report it.”
He cited the case of a woman who had been raped and, when she went to report it to the police, was arrested and then raped again by four officers.
Dianne Kohler Barnard of the DA said it seemed only if incidents were captured on cellphones and broadcast to the world was action taken, as in the case of Mozambican Mido Macia.
If the incident in which he was dragged behind a police van had not been filmed, it would have been recorded as “just another criminal foreigner dealt with effectively and efficiently by our SAPS”.
“I fear minister, in dealing with these incidents as isolated, individual, silo events, this will not treat the root causes, but it does seem to me that’s what you are attempting to do,” she said.
Police oversight committee chairwoman Annelize van Wyk (ANC) said MPs were frustrated by the lack of consequences for wrongdoing.
“We’ve received a report on the Northern Cape, where there’s a list of fraud, fraud, fraud committed by police officers found guilty in court, and then the internal police process is simply a R100 fine.”
MPs had visited the Wierda River police station in Centurion, where the rape mentioned by Groenewald had occurred, and left saying to themselves “we’re scared”.
Mthethwa earlier assured the committee that the service was committed to human rights and that officers should see themselves as “enforcers of the law and not the law itself”.
“I want to reiterate that the recent unfortunate acts of certain individuals in SAPS are nothing else and cannot be conflated with the institution itself,” Mthethwa said, adding that those who had a case to answer would be prosecuted.
He was echoing remarks by President Jacob Zuma in Parliament last week, when he claimed incidents of police brutality were “isolated”.
There had been “lapses in command and control” and it was true there was an “old culture” of officers protecting one another from investigation of wrongdoing, Mthethwa said.
The department was working with the SA Human Rights Commission and its UN counterpart on a programme to help instil a human rights ethos beyond the initial training, where it was also a focus.
A gathering of police management in January had resolved to publish the names of prospective police recruits so communities could identify those they didn’t trust.
Political Bureau