Corruption ‘making officers easy prey’

Cape Town - 090127 - At Khayelitsha's Nonceba Hall on National Police Day there was a meeting to help organize how local organizations could assist the police in dealing with community issues. Photo by Skyler Reid.

Cape Town - 090127 - At Khayelitsha's Nonceba Hall on National Police Day there was a meeting to help organize how local organizations could assist the police in dealing with community issues. Photo by Skyler Reid.

Published Aug 29, 2015

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Johannesburg - The fight against corruption is costing police lives, according to Deputy National Police Commissioner Khehla Sithole.

Briefing Parliament’s police oversight committee on Friday 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 details of their dedicated colleagues, such as their home addresses, identities of their children and the places which they frequented, so they could be killed by criminals.

In at least one high-profile case investigators had to be protected by members of the Tactical Response Team.

Sithole said criminals also studied police tactics – sometimes with the assistance of former 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 SAPS 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 get to them.

Abandoned buildings were also used 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.

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 SAPS 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.

Saturday Star

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