A protester is injured by police after they opened
fire with rubber bullets during the third day on of ongoing service delivery
riots in South Africa.
Sunday, March 23, 2014
Crimes of the South African Police Service
South African Police
Service Agitating the Community
Police brutality: Residents protest after the death
of taxi driver Mido Macia in Daveyton, near Johannesburg, South Africa last
week
Crimes of the South African Police Service
Cop car with tail gate
door open whilst driving/ Broken tail light
South African Police Service van
Crimes of the South African Police Service
South Africa
Police accused of Women's
Day brutality
South Africa
Sunday 11 August 2013 - 6:52am
August 11 - A Durban family has
been left traumatised by a police raid on Women's Day. They're accusing police
of planting evidence, stealing cash and brutality. They've now laid charges of
theft and assault against the cops.
DURBAN - A Durban family has been
left traumatised by a police raid on Women's Day.
He hurt me and I was so scared
and I didn’t know what to do
They're accusing police of
planting evidence, stealing cash and of brutality.
Police acted on a drugs tip-off,
and stormed the house during a family dinner.
They searched every room, but
when they found nothing, they allegedly became aggressive.
Daughter, Narusha Chetty said a
policeman grabbed her by her neck and arm.
"He hurt me and I was so
scared and I didn’t know what to do, and then they were talking to my dad and
they were screaming at him,” she said.
The family has now laid charges
of theft and assault against the cops.
Crimes of the South African Police Service
Motorist traumatised after police 'arrest'
August 19 2013 at 10:21am
By Valeska Abreu
By Valeska Abreu
Pretoria News
A five-hour ordeal in
the back of a Joburg metro police department (JMPD) van has left a Waterkloof
man traumatised and fearful of the men in uniform. Photo: Valeska Abreu
Pretoria - A five-hour ordeal in the
back of a Joburg metro police department (JMPD) van has left a Waterkloof man
traumatised and fearful of the men in uniform.
What was supposed to be a normal
afternoon drive home from work along the N1 soon turned into
something from a Carte Blanche
documentary, Roberto Strydom said, with his hand covering the right side of his
bruised face.
The 24-year-old said he was stopped by
three members of the JMPD on the Olifantsfontein off-ramp, thinking it was a
routine check.
As he was not speeding, he gladly
stopped.
“The two white men asked me for my
driving licence while a third black male checked my vehicle. Something about
them put me off, though. Their uniform and even vehicle just didn’t look too
legit, but I still co-operated with them. They said they could smell alcohol on
my breath, but I said that was impossible because it was half-four in the
afternoon and I had just left work.”
Strydom said he was forcefully pulled
from his vehicle, pushed against his car, and asked for money or he risked
being taken to jail.
“I told them they could take me to jail
and do the Breathalyser test, and that would prove I hadn’t drunk, but they
started getting agitated with me. That’s when they cuffed me and dragged me to
their bakkie, and threw me in the back of the vehicle.”
Strydom’s initial thought was that he
was being taken to a police station, as his alleged kidnappers did not read out
his rights or say much, but as darkness fell Strydom realised he was in
trouble.
“I started feeling claustrophobic. I
could see out of the van, I was banging on the front of the van to get the
attention of the officers to find out what was going on.
“I felt so afraid as the hours went by
and I lost track of time. I had no idea what they were going to do with me,
considering all these stories you read about.”
Strydom said he became completely
disoriented.
“The next thing I remember is that they
stopped and opened the door, they aimed a bright light into my face and grabbed
me out. All of a sudden I felt a heavy blow to my face. One guy said again that
if I paid them, they would let me go.
Strydom said he refused and was again
hit with something.
“The next thing I remember was waking
up in the back seat of my car, tied to the door with a cable tie.”
It took him a while before he managed
to put on the hazard lights of his car. He also managed to grab his cellphone,
which was vibrating at the time with an incoming call from his brother.
“I spoke to my brother and he kept
asking where I was, but I could not see anything as I was dazed. I forced
myself to focus and could see the name of a tile company and gave it to him.”
A patrolling security van came to his
rescue.
“The guy stopped and then helped cut me
loose, and then told me where I was. I called my brother back and told him I
was on Old Johannesburg Road. Soon after that paramedics, police and my family
arrived.”
This was not, however, the first ordeal
Strydom had experienced. In 2010, he was assaulted and tortured in the back
seat of his vehicle by hijackers for more than eight hours. He escaped after
another car drove into them and the hijackers fled.
“It took me a long while and a lot of
therapy sessions to get past that, and now this happens, worst of all by men in
uniform. You hear about this kind of stuff all the time, but it is still so
surreal when it happens to you,” he said.
Strydom said a part of him still
doubted that the officers were genuine JMPD members.
JMPD spokesman Wayne Minnaar said an
internal investigation was under way.
Pretoria News
Crimes of the South African Police Service
Dockets stolen from KZN police station
February 10 2014 at 09:04pm
By SAPA
By SAPA
Pietermaritzburg –
Ninety-five dockets
were stolen from the Alexandra Road police station in Pietermaritzburg,
KwaZulu-Natal police said on Monday.
The burglary happened on January 29,
Captain Thulani Zwane said.
A detective reported for duty around
7.30 am and found his office door open.
“Upon further inspection he noticed
that 95 of his dockets, which included charges related to theft, malicious
damage to property and drunken driving, were taken,” Zwane said.
He said no forced entry was noted on
the premises.
“It is believed that the investigating
officer locked his door the previous day, January 28, at about 4pm and when he
returned the following day he discovered the office was broken into,” Zwane
said.
No arrests have yet been made.
“The theft of these dockets will not
have any impact on investigation since the dockets are scanned. Electronic
copies of the dockets are available and the information from the docket is
captured on the system,” he said.
Sapa
Crimes of the South African Police Service
Ex-police liaison man on theft rap
March 19 2014 at 03:22pm
By Daneel Knoetze
By Daneel Knoetze
CAPE ARGUS
Former metro police
spokesman Nowellen Petersen has been arrested and charged with stealing a sound
system from the City of Cape Town.
Cape Town - Former metro police
spokesman Nowellen Petersen has been arrested and charged with stealing a sound
system from the City of Cape Town.
Police spokesman Captain FC van Wyk
said Petersen had been arrested on Friday.
He signed had out the sound equipment,
worth R33 000, before he resigned from his job in January. He had not returned
it and metro police laid a charge of theft.
A follow-up investigation led police to
a shop in Wynberg, where the sound system had apparently been sold for about R3
000, said JP Smith, Mayoral Committee Member for Safety and Security.
“In performing his duties related to
metro police’s communications component, Petersen regularly had to sign out
that equipment,” Smith said.
“I am very disappointed in him. He is
an official who was in the public eye and needs to set a better example.
“What is also baffling is the fact that
he was allowed to leave his position without having returned the equipment,” he
said.
Petersen appeared in the Cape Town
Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday. It is believed he was released on bail but this
could not be independently confirmed.
Calls to his cellphone on Thursday
morning went unanswered.
Petersen’s former position as metro
police spokesman is still vacant and will take three to six months to fill.
daneel.knoetze@inl.co.za
Cape Argus
http://www.iol.co.za/news/crime-courts/ex-police-liaison-man-on-theft-rap-1.1663907
Crimes of the South African Police Service
Footage of Cape Town police
brutality emerges
South Africa
Friday 7 March 2014 - 9:35am
JOHANNESBURG - Western Cape
police are investigating an incident of police brutality in Cape Town.
Video footage shot by bystander
(who asked eNCA not to be identified) and posted on social network Facebook on
Thursday shows two uniformed policemen kicking the naked man in the groin
outside a car.
Footage shows three other men -
presumably security personnel in the area - holding the man's arms, while the
two SAPS officers take turns assaulting the victim as people walk by.
It is not clear what led to the
assault.
The bystander, who was at work at
the time, said one of the policemen approached her workplace after she yelled
at the police asking why the man was being assaulted.
She said a friend of hers was
arrested for alleged police interference. The charge was dropped at a later
stage.
Crimes of the South African Police Service
17 March 2014
Hey World!!!
Remember how you wet your panties when
there were images flashed around the world of the evil racist White South
African police force shooting at the poor defenseless oppressed Blacks??
FYI - those photos usually only told one side of the story, and that was NEVER the truth.
Well, seeing as you were all outraged and stuff back then - back when the country had a functioning White government - here you go! Something to really wet your panties over. A BLACK police man shooting a Black oppressed person at point blank range!
Wet away. Or are you not interested these days??
Yeah, thought so.
Hat tip: Nick A
FYI - those photos usually only told one side of the story, and that was NEVER the truth.
Well, seeing as you were all outraged and stuff back then - back when the country had a functioning White government - here you go! Something to really wet your panties over. A BLACK police man shooting a Black oppressed person at point blank range!
Wet away. Or are you not interested these days??
Yeah, thought so.
Hat tip: Nick A
Crimes of the South African Police Service
Cops probing new police brutality incident
2014-03-07 13:21
Police officers are seen beating a naked man in
Cape Town. (Nicole Speelman, Facebook)
Cape Town - An incident of alleged police
brutality in Cape Town, which was filmed by a member of the public, is being
investigated by Western Cape police.
The footage was posted on Facebook
by Nicole Speelman on Thursday.
She had filmed the incident from her
office in Cape Town. In the footage, two uniformed police officers are seen
punching and kicking a naked man. Security personnel are also seen holding the
man's arms. Bystanders are seen walking past and stopping to observe.
Speelman also stated in a Facebook
post that she yelled at police from her office window, and a policeman came up
to her office to arrest her for screaming at the police.
She added that she and her
colleagues asked the policeman why he and his colleagues had beaten the man.
"..He said he was just trying to get him in the van and he arrested my
colleague for police interference and the charges was later dropped".
The DA has condemned the
"vicious attack".
Dianne Kohler Barnard for the DA
said: "What was even more disturbing is that police aggressively manhandled,
pushed, choked, punched and kicked him repeatedly."
She said people living in South
Africa are tired in living in fear of both criminals and a handful of thuggish
police officers.
Western Cape police spokesperson
November Filander told eNCA that police were assessing the footage.
Crimes of the South African Police Service
'beaten
by South African police'
Radovan Krejcir: Czech man 'beaten by South African police'. Radovan Krejcir
(24 July 2013) Radovan Krejcir denies having links to the criminal underworld
Crimes of the South African Police Service
South African police
accused of routinely torturing crime suspects
Arrested
men say how they experienced police brutality from beatings to suffocation used
to extract confessions
theguardian.com, Sunday 14 April 2013 15.38 BST
The
killing of striking miners at Marikana, South Africa, in 2012 is among
incidents that have led to accusations of police brutality. Photograph:
AFP/Getty Images
The
Bloemfontein tourist centre is a neat, red building overlooking the bus
terminal and the football stadium. For visitors to the city it's a fountain of
information and advice, but taxi driver William Dube says that for him the
innocuous-looking building will always be associated with his torture at the hands of the police.
Dube, a
33-year-old from Pretoria, is awaiting trial in Bloemfontein's Grootvlei prison
after being arrested in 2010 on armed robbery charges, by officers of South Africa's organised crime unit. Two weeks later, he says
he was taken to an unmarked suite of offices in the tourist centre, where the
officers cuffed him to a chair.
"They
attached wires to my penis and back from something that looked like an old
phone," he said. "Then they wound it up to get power to shock me. It
was very, very painful. I even wet myself."
Dube said
the officers covered his head with a plastic bag and sealed it with duct tape.
"They only remove the plastic when you collapse, then they take it off.
While they were suffocating me, they put pepper spray inside the plastic bag
and sealed it. They kicked and punched me in the eye and ear. I still can't
hear properly."
He says
he was taken to the balcony and hung upside down over the edge, an officer
holding each leg. That is when he agreed to co-operate with the investigation.
"I
was terrified they'd drop me," Dube said. "They told me places to
point out, how to make a confession and what to say. I did the pointing out the
next day."
Under
apartheid, the South African police were notorious for torturing and abusing
political detainees, with many unexplained deaths in police cells. But similar
brutality in the "new" South African police service has come to the
forefront recently, after the massacre of striking mine workers at Marikana and
the death in the township of Daveyton of Mido Macia, a Mozambican who was tied
to the back of a police van and dragged along the road.
The
Independent Complaints Directorate's 2011-12 report records 4,923 complaints
received against the police and 720 deaths in police custody or as a result of
police action.
"Torture
hasn't suddenly reared its ugly head," said Professor Peter Jordi of the
Wits Law Clinic at the University of Witwatersrand, who specialises in the
subject of torture. "It's never stopped … It was carried out at police
stations before and continues today. Previously, it was believed that mostly
political detainees were tortured. If you're a criminal arrested for armed
robbery today, you face exactly the same fate."
Most
incidents of assault and torture are not reported. And if they are, they are
unlikely to come to court. Take the allegations made by Dube's co-accused,
Mzwandile Khani Khani. Arrested at the same time as Dube, Khani alleges he was
brutally assaulted at his home. Two weeks later, he says he was booked out of
Grootvlei hospital by organised crime unit members and taken to the tourist
centre for a second round of beatings, assault and torture. Like Dube, he says
he was cuffed to a chair, had a plastic bag placed over his head and wires
attached to his back and penis.
"I
was shocked repeatedly for almost four hours in front of a woman officer. There
were nine or 10 policemen watching, and kicking me. One of them opened my legs
and kicked me in my private parts. I collapsed and fainted. They waited for me
to regain consciousness and laughed at me. I heard them say 'hierdie kaffir
is baie sterk' [this kaffir is very strong]." Nearly two years later,
Khani's hospital records confirm that he still bears injuries.
Khani was
one of those to report the matter to Groootvlei prison authorities and to lay
charges of assault with intention to do grievous bodily harm against the
officers he claims are responsible. He has heard nothing since.
Another
co-accused, Lucky Mametsa, said he was also taken to the tourist centre, where
his head was repeatedly bashed against a wall to elicit a confession. When he
eventually received medical care, he was diagnosed with a broken cheekbone and
skull fracture and sent to hospital.
As
Mametsa tells it, a scan and x-ray showed the fracture. "The doctor wrote
a full-page script but I never received any medicine till today." On his
second visit to hospital, Mametsa said he was told he needed an operation, but
when he returned for his third appointment his medical records had disappeared.
Again he says he was told there was nothing wrong with him.
It is
often difficult to corroborate torture allegations because there is no
evidence, but when former boxer David Seleke was assaulted outside his home by
police the incident was recorded on camera.
Seleke
said he was attacked, pepper-sprayed, kicked, beaten and shocked with
"something like a cow-prod that the boere [farmers] use for
animals" in front of his neighbours. Surveillance cameras that he had
installed in his home for his money-lending business recorded the assaults.
Unfortunately, the monitor and footage were confiscated by the police.
"Straight
after my arrest, I laid charges of assault," he said. "I also
complained to the Independent Complaints Directorate. They confirmed the case
but said my statement had disappeared. Only a blank docket remained."
Dube,
Khani, Mametsa and Seleke are awaiting trial in Grootvlei Prison. Their
co-accused, who also say they were mistreated by police, were released on bail
last month. To date, all attempts by the men to seek redress have fallen on
deaf ears, so they are suing the minister of police, Nathi Mthethwa, for
damages.
In
addition to laying charges, reporting the matter to the Judicial Inspectorate
of Correctional Services and the head of Grootvlei, they have written to the
Human Rights Commission, the Independent Complaints Directorate, and Ace
Magashula, premier of Free State province.
Police
spokesman Brigadier Billy Jones said he was aware of the allegations, which
were being investigated. "This office can only confirm that the mentioned
accused, who are making these allegations, are currently facing serious
charges, namely two of armed robbery and one of burglary at business
premises," he said.
The right
to be free from torture is enshrined in South Africa's constitution, yet observers
say torture is used is part and parcel of criminal investigations.
"Police
torture is a daily occurrence in Gauteng where I practise," said Jordi.
"I probably handled more than 20 torture cases against the police in
Gauteng alone last year."
Jordi
believes judges and magistrates are equally to blame. "They deal with
individual cases where torture is alleged and ignore the evidence staring them
in the face."
Crimes of the South African Police Service
Mpuma cops deny torture claims
2014-02-27 21:03
(Nielen de Klerk, News24)
Mbombela - Police officers
investigating a muti murder involving a 6-year-old Mpumalanga girl have denied
torturing one of the accused into confessing to the crime.
They were testifying on Thursday in
a trial-within-a-trial where Sifiso Vilakazi, 25, Thabile Mnisi, 33, and Stella
Zulu, 49, are charged with murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
The matter was being heard in the
Nelspruit circuit of the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria, a Sapa
correspondent reported.
The three are accused of killing
Dimakatso Shabangu, who went missing on 21 April 2009. Her body was found
floating in a river four days later.
The court heard that Zulu was not
acquitted from the crime, but had challenged the confession statement she said
she was tortured into signing.
This led to a separate trial for the
court to establish if her allegations were true.
The court heard Zulu was tortured
with a plastic bag and suffocated during interrogations until she signed the
confession.
"It is not true that I tubed
her to make her confess. I know that she was taken to officer Mabunda for an
interview. I was called as a female when she needed to go to the toilet so that
I could escort her," said Detective Constable Phumzile Shungube, from
Tonga police station.
Defence lawyer Jacques Oosthuizen
asked Shungube if she recorded her work in her pocket book on a daily basis as
required.
She told the court that she
sometimes ran out of pocket books or lost them.
"I noted everything I was doing
on that day as I was busy assisting with the case. I do not know where my
pocket book is," said Shungube.
Torture claims
Oosthuizen explained to the court
that Zulu had told him she was assaulted, threatened and tortured into
confessing.
He said Zulu named Shungube and
other officers.
"She was forced to lie on her
back on the desk of officer Mangane. She lay there and fell down," said
Oosthuizen.
Constable Myburgh Mashabane told the
court he was only part of the team investigating Shabangu's disappearance and
he knew nothing about the torture claims.
"I was part of the searching
team, tasked by my supervisor officer Mangane and I do not know anything about
tubing; I have only heard about it on television. Since I have heard about it
now, I will get more information on it," he said.
Tonga police crime prevention sector
commander Captain Timothy Simon Mbombi told the court that Zulu confessed to
having suffered nightmares because of the murder she and her co-accused had
committed.
"She told me that she
understands the confession because she made a statement to the magistrate. I am
a police officer that can take a statement and give evidence in court,"
Mbombi said.
"I explained to her that she
can call her lawyer or get a state lawyer but she told me that she would
consider a lawyer later. She said 'I am having nightmares and I cannot sleep at
night'."
Mbombi said Zulu told him she would
show him where Shabangu was murdered.
Swelling
Earlier, Nsikazi Magistrate Snowy
Masango testified that he noticed Zulu was swollen when she came to court but
did nothing about it.
"She told me that she was
swollen and I saw that she was swollen. I made a mistake there. I did not
regard it as wounds but swelling. I did nothing to assist her because she was
under police's hands. I trusted them and maybe I forgot to think of taking
action," said Masango.
He said Zulu told her she had been
assaulted by an angry mob from her community.
"I asked her if she had been
forced, assaulted or threatened to make a statement by any police officer and
she said no. I then asked her if the community had forced, assaulted or
threatened her into making a statement to the police and she said yes.
"I wrote it down but I did not
see where she was hurt but she told me she was assaulted by members of the
community. She did not have any cuts," said Masango.
Vilakazi, Mnisi and Zulu have
pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Vilakazi and Mnisi are out on R3 000
bail while Zulu is out on R5 000 bail.
- SAPA
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