For 20 years ministers in charge of the police have been telling them to beat up or kill criminals
The cases of brutal enforcement of the Covid-19 lockdown wasn’t the work of a few bad apples but was rather part of an unofficial policy of police violence. The directive was, as the minister in charge of the South African Police Service said 20 years ago: “When we visit criminals we will not treat them with kid gloves … We will unleash the police force on them.”
David Bruce, then a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, said in a 2002 report on police brutality that, from April 1998 to March 1999, the Independent Complaints Directorate recorded “1 051 cases of deaths as a result of police action, 468 cases of attempted murder and assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm, 128 cases of torture and 736 cases of common assault”.
Police ministers don’t talk about how, according to the World Economic Forum, South Africa ranks 121 out of 144 countries in terms of police reliability. Echoing Tshwete’s instruction to police members in 2000 that criminals are “subhumans”, the deputy police minister in 2015, Maggie Sotyu, instructed the police to: “Treat heinous criminals as outcasts, who must neither have place in the society nor peace in their cells! They must be treated as cockroaches!”
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