Police cannot continue to be at war with the people

31 January 2014 - 02:23 By The Times Editorial
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Policing in South Africa is in crisis. This is evident from the fact that, this month alone, seven people have been killed by police battling to put down increasingly violent service-delivery protests.

Tuesday night's chilling siege, by about 2000 people, of a satellite police station in a Limpopo village, underlines the argument that the SAPS is steadily losing legitimacy.

To be fair to the officers in Relela village, near Tzaneen, their lives were on the line and they had to use sharp-point ammunition to defend themselves from a huge, rampaging mob.

But why would people attack the men and women meant to serve them, simply because no arrests had been made for what appears to have been a particularly brutal muti murder?

Why is there such distrust of the police that they are not given time to do their job properly and make arrests when they have a watertight case?

Part of the answer might lie in the complete breakdown of community and leadership structures in places such as Relela - reports yesterday suggested that, as the violence spread, neighbours were attacking each other. Lack of jobs and service-delivery failures might also be fuelling the community's anger.

But it is also true that many people perceive the police to be corrupt, incapable or unwilling to deal effectively with their complaints, and sometimes brutal.

There have been too many morale-sapping graft scandals - some involving the police top brass - too many suspects beaten up or worse, too many instances of slap-dash police work, of dockets going "missing" and the like.

National police commissioner Riah Phiyega says that the police are not trigger-happy. But their response to the violent service-delivery protests near Brits and in Roodepoort this month suggests otherwise.

Terrified officers tasked with quelling protests are still arming themselves with - and using - sharp-point ammunition in contravention of crowd-control protocols. Police management did well to arrest the officers who broke the law but the SAPS's crowd-control tactics need to be completely revamped. Then a start must be made on cleaning up the image of the police.

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