No need to banish the watchdog, just let it starve

It’s remarkable how dumb those thugs are. Ministers promise that the police will “kill the bastards”, but the baddies just don’t get it. Every week there are “criminals” being shot dead because they “resisted arrest” and went for their guns.

Now and again the police accounts admittedly sound a tad dubious and there has been the occasional Oops! moment — like the three-year-old who was killed last year — but what the hell. Most of these deaths deservedly go unlamented by the great South African public and we can surely trust that the police watchdog is in control.

Actually, no. The watchdog is on its last legs, shuffling towards the euthanasia room.

A few years ago the then police National Commissioner, Jackie Selebi, called for the disbanding of the Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD) because it had “outlived its usefulness”. In the new South Africa the police could be trusted to monitor themselves, said Selebi.

Selebi was right. Not about the ability of the SA Police Service (SAPS) to monitor itself, but about the ICD’s usefulness.

The ICD has joined an array of Chapter Nine oversight institutions set up to secure SA’s new democracy, but which have subsided into ennui because the government has absolutely no intention of being constrained. Think of the toothless SA Human Rights Commission at which the African National Congress Youth League with monotonous regularity thumbs its nose; the spineless Public Protector who unabashedly covers government’s rear; the sonorously named but near-invisible Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities; and the vocal but hapless Commission for Gender Equality, which the ANC itself concedes is clueless.

Out of this array of ANC-commandeered institutions, it is the ICD that matters most to ordinary South Africans. The criminal charges that the erstwhile commissioner now faces are just the tip of a police iceberg of incompetence, unlawful killing, torture and corruption.

Poorly trained and often poorly led, the SAPS increasingly sees itself as above the laws it is supposed to police. Not a week goes by without another allegation of outrageous police brutality or incompetence.

Each year there are some 6 000 complaints against police officers, many involving claims of torture, rape, assault and unlawful death. In the year to March 2009, the cops shot and killed 556 suspects of which at least 32, it conceded, were innocent bystanders.

In 2008, according to an ICD statement hastily retracted for “audit and verification”, the directorate was investigating 830 law enforcement officers in KwaZulu-Natal alone, of which 174 involved deaths in custody. In the entire previous year only one conviction had been secured by the ICD.

The ICD, charged with the “effective and efficient” investigation of police misconduct and criminality, is clearly overwhelmed. It last issued an annual report in 2001. It only has half the staff that it is entitled to, but its website lists no vacancies.

There are fewer than a hundred ICD investigators and the SAPS routinely stonewalls their investigators. Bizarrely, SAPS officers are not compelled to call ICD investigators to a police killing, nor are they obligated to provide a statement in response to ICD inquiries.

Last year the Democratic Alliance managed to ferret out that around 90% of ICD recommendations to the SAPS are simply ignored. Of those that are acknowledged, the SAPS comply just over half of the time.

It is worth visiting the ICD’s doleful little website to view its plight. Its handful of media releases trumpet paltry successes — mostly drunken cops who shot their partners — all with the signature flourish of “we hope this will serve as a warning to other police officers that we will leave no stone unturned in ensuring that justice prevails in the end”.

No need to banish the watchdog, just let it starve.

The Police Independent Complaints Directorate site: www.icd.gov.za