With three policemen shot dead and two injured in two separate shooting incidents within a space of 48 hours, experts have called on police management to take drastic action to protect them. In the early hours of yesterday, a policeman was wounded when AK47-wielding gunmen, hiding in the back of a truck, opened fire on officers in Kempton Park.The officers had stopped the truck after noticing it had been fitted with false number plates.On Sunday three policemen died after a shooting on the N3, near Modderfontein, when they tried to stop a hijacked BMW.One of the gunmen, who was wounded in the shooting, was on parole after being convicted of armed robbery.The shootings follow the murder of a policeman in a robbery at Johannesburg's Park Station last week and the killing of a Pretoria policeman, shot dead in his van when he and his partner stopped a suspected hijacked car.Institute for Security Studies policing researcher Dr Johan Burger said: "We cannot have a situation in which violent crime continues to increase ... The violence against the police is horrendous."He said police management must start thinking about providing police officers with armoured cars."Bulletproof vests are no longer enough. With the sophisticated weapons criminals carry, the 'soft-skinned' vehicles police drive are not good enough," he said.Burger believes criminals' daring willingness to "take on" officers was because of South Africa's ever-rising violent crime levels, with aggravated robberies increasing by over 50 a day since three years ago...