Since Friday, videos on social media showing abuse by police officers during the first weekend of the national lockdown have outraged South Africans.
But these videos expose what has always gone on. What we saw this weekend is a consequence of a deeply rooted culture of impunity within the police.
It is underwritten by failing oversight mechanisms and a general lack of political will to see the police held accountable.
In fact, official reports to the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) since the beginning of the lockdown have gone down, dipping below the usual daily average.
Between April 2012 and March last year, IPID registered an average of 17 new cases per day.
In the three days following the lockdown, IPID registered a total of 21 new cases. Perhaps this is an indicator that reporting is more difficult during lockdown.
By comparison, over the same three days in 2018 (the most recent year for which we could access complete data), IPID registered 67 new cases, including 46 cases of “torture or assault”, three related to “death as a result of police action” and one “rape by a police officer”.
In spite of the lower intake by IPID, the rate at which the police have killed people during lockdown – three within the first three days – has kept pace with prior trends.
For over a year, Viewfinder has been collating and analysing the records of tens of thousands of criminal complaints against the police, registered since data collection began in 1998.
We have spoken to IPID officials about their challenges at the front lines of investigating torture, assault, rape and murder cases against the police.
We have come to appreciate how pervasive abuse by police officers is, and how it outstrips the state’s capacity to enforce oversight and accountability.
Our findings have prompted experts to publish policy recommendations to get Parliament’s portfolio committee for policing (PCP) and IPID to heed them.
While offending police officers are scattered across hundreds of precincts, there are often discernible trends in how, where and when abuse is meted out.
Reported incidents are concentrated in poor communities. Protests and gatherings often invite disproportionate force. The method for torturing suspects in custody – particularly via suffocation by “tubing” – are remarkably consistent across precincts and provinces.
The circumstances within which extortion and bribery occur often have much in common.
People perceived as criminal suspects, as many out on the streets during the lockdown are, are often assaulted or shot at without cause. Some of these suspects die as a result, as happened to a Ravensmead man who collapsed and died after an assault by police on Friday morning.
We believe that the trends indicate that police officers do not act in rogue isolation when they commit these offences.
They are not “bad apples“, as is often claimed by police management when distancing itself from incidents that attract public outrage.
When they abuse, police officers often act within decades-old traditions and the unwritten prescripts of their organisation.
They usually have a deep regard for their place in the institution’s hierarchy and act under the tacit direction of their superiors.
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Those who tend away from committing abuses themselves often enforce a code of silence when they witness or suspect abuses by their colleagues.
The police appear no less brazen during this time of intensified scrutiny.
If the many recent videos are verified, officers have largely ignored the cameras that have recorded their offenses.
Police officers enforcing the lockdown with rubber bullets and sjamboks on the streets of Hillbrow in Johannesburg on Tuesday shrugged off probing questions from reporters. They were following orders from “the top”, they said.
In the current hierarchy, former police commissioner and current Minister of Police Bheki Cele is that top cop. Last week, Cele warned of arrest and consequences for anyone found to be in contravention of the lockdown regulations
– News24
