Uniting against Police killers

Busisiwe Mehlwana on Tuesday became the 48th police officer to be killed this year.

The 33-year-old reservist was shot dead by robbers when she and a colleague responded to a report of an ATM bombing in Soweto at about 10.30pm.

Today, Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa and national police commissioner Bheki Cele will meet representatives of community policing forums, business and research institutions to discuss ways of stopping the killings.

Mthethwa said the deaths of 48 officers in the first six months of this year were "unacceptable".

"It doesn't build the confidence of society when people who are supposed to protect us are killed the way they are," he said at police headquarters in Pretoria.

Most of the officers were shot while on duty. Some sustained several wounds in attacks by several assailants.

In May, Warrant Officer Gershwin Matthee and Constable Cannon Cloete were both shot in the head in Cape Town when responding to a rape call.

Mthethwa said the circumstances in which most of the killings took place suggested that criminals were "feeling the heat" because of visible policing and the police's success in lowering the crime rate.

He attributed the killings to "greed, heartlessness and hate".

"These killings definitely have nothing to do with loss of respect for police, but everything to do with some people who can see the success of policing in the fight against crime," he said.

Society's respect for the police, said Mthethwa, was evident from the large number of tip-offs and other help that police get from citizens when rooting out criminals in their neighbourhood.

Mthethwa and more than 100 delegates will meet in Boksburg, on the East Rand, today to examine whether police systems and strategies adequately protect police officers.

"We are calling on all these different sectors to draw from their scientific, qualitative, personal and academic expertise [so] that we can all tackle this challenge of the killing of our members," he said.

Mthethwa said one of his most daunting duties was having to offer his condolences to the families of murdered officers.

"These are men and women who support their families, who go and make a living for their families . As the minister of police, you have to go to their wives and hand over the flag of South Africa and the duty cap. It is not a nice thing."

Also on today's agenda, Mthethwa said, was police brutality.

There were "unfortunate" cases, he conceded, where policemen "don't give us a good name".

He said he was "on the case" and had ordered police management to come up with better crowd-control measures that would lessen the likelihood of injuries.