In a society under siege from wave upon wave of crime, so much of it violent, it seems not even our police, the very people we expect to keep us safe, are immune.
Before releasing the country’s quarterly crime statistics on Friday, police minister Bheki Cele announced 24 cops had been murdered between January and March 2021. It was a “crisis”, he said.
“So it cannot be normal that police officers, who every day go out there to protect and serve, are killed and the public remains unshaken. There is no public outrage, no outcry from activists and NGOs — and no-one is demanding justice for them.
“If we are to win this fight against crime, such criminal acts against police officers can’t be ignored but must be addressed at community level,” he said.
In many respects, he is correct. Certainly, it is a crisis when our women and men in blue are killed. But to suggest the country “remains unshaken” is an unfair assessment. We are shaken, we are angry — but when that same citizenry falls victim to murder in higher numbers (4,976 people were killed in the first three months of this year, 387 more compared to the corresponding period in the previous financial year) it is hard to single out killings of police officers for outrage.
Asked about the issue of police murders, Gareth Newham of the Institute of Security Studies said the majority of police murdered were off duty. Even in the stats released on Friday, Cele said 13 were off duty and 11 on duty.
What that showed, said Newham, was that police were in most cases victims of crime just like the rest of us. They are murdered at home, at shebeens, in shops.
Though it did happen, it was not always the case that criminals were actively targeting cops, said Newham. Even when police were killed on duty, in most cases they were responding to crimes in progress.
Targeted hits were the exception, not the norm.
So while we mourn the deaths of these two dozen officers, and the hundreds to suffer the same fate in recent years, their deaths speak to the need to protect SA citizens, no matter the uniforms they wear – or don’t. Crime intelligence needs to be improved to stop crimes proactively, and the justice system needs to ensure that those caught are punished quickly and effectively.
If this happens, all South Africans will be safer, including those who swear to serve and protect.
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