Posted by wickedmike on Oct 21, 2012
Well-written and scary
opinion piece written by William Saunderson-Meyer:
An annual report – be it
corporate or government – is less about telling stakeholders what’s happened,
than glossing over failures and organisational cankers. When it documents the
activities of a paramilitary, the public relations varnish hides the stench of
real corpses.
The annual report of the
Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD), tasked with controlling illegal
police behaviour, was recently tabled in Parliament to curiously cursory media
coverage. That’s surprising, given that in 2011/12 there were 4 923
investigations into South African Police Service (SAPS) malfeasance, most
seriously for wrongful actions in 720 deaths.
That’s equivalent to about
two people a day dead as a result of SAPS actions. The 34 tragically killed by
police fire at Marikana, in context, amount to just over an average fortnight
of SAPS-linked deaths.
As disturbing as the
alleged SAPS misbehaviour is the confusion of the ICD, recently renamed the
Independent Police Investigations Directorate (IPID), as to what it should be
doing. The key performance indicator of ICD success should be the number of
rogue cops brought to justice.
Instead what looms largest
in the ICD report is the number of ‘awareness sessions’ it held, how many staff
team building sessions it conducted, and how many disabled staff it has. Such
avoidance tactics are understandable, however, for no matter how ICD spin the
statistics, they are grim.
Adding in carried forward
cases, the ICD investigated 839 deaths in 2012, delivering 162 prosecution
recommendations, in turn netting a paltry 13 convictions of bad cops. It
made 168 recommendations for internal SAPS disciplinaries regarding deaths,
which netted 5 officer dismissals.
ICD also investigated
2 912 other criminal allegations, leading to 383 prosecution
recommendations, but netting only 23 officer convictions. The question,
never asked in the IDC report, is whether its failures are due to its useless
investigators or the useless staff of the National Prosecuting Authority…
