Deputy Speaker, in 1994, as a country we moved away from an era when policing had been in total thrall to the political regime. We created a Police Service and moved away from what was previously a police force - a police force that literally forced citizens to look down the barrel of a gun should they attempt to question their right not to live under unjust laws and globally despised policies. Indeed, any citizen who attempted to stand up against them was treated extremely harshly, and political prisoners regularly slipped on a bar of soap and fell out of the top floors of police headquarters all around the country.
An effective oversight and investigatory unit was required in order to serve as a watchdog for the police. However, for as many years as I have been on the Police or the Safety and Security portfolio committee, as it was called during the last term, I have been watching the ICD exemplify the most cynical nonimplementation of the constitutional mandate.
Before the unit was established in 1997, the SAPS had a special investigation unit based in Pretoria that dealt with corruption cases. But they closed that down and created the anticorruption unit, which they also closed down, claiming that the ICD would deal with such matters. They then very deliberately kept the ICD on a shoestring budget, effectively ensuring that the police complaint system was marginalised at a time of entrenched corruption and criminality within the SAPS and indeed at a time when, elsewhere in the world, the handling of such complaints by the public was developing apace. What the public was left with was 219 people nationwide to deal with deaths in police custody or as a result of police action or other serious police transgressions. The ICD had a 23% turnover rate and the anticorruption unit had three investigators and one investigation officer per 44 000 SAPS members.
Today in this House we take a great stride forward in at long last giving the ICD - soon to be known as Ipid - the teeth of a bulldog. One must focus on the reasons for this new legislation. It is absolutely possible that the hon members who created the ICD in 1997 believed they were creating implementable legislation, but it had one fatal flaw. They presumed that the SAPS would honour the spirit of the Bill. The ICD recommendations regarding criminality, misconduct or deaths - as the case may have been - were in fact, in most cases, ignored. Sadly, the nation learnt the hard way that SAPS members are mere flesh and blood like the rest of us and, given an option, would inevitably take the easiest way out.
At the outset the indications were that the system would work well, but after the honeymoon came the cold, hard reality that what had been created was in fact a marriage from hell. The SAPS woke up to the fact that there was gestating within it an entity created to crush its own criminality. But, to their relief, they realised that there was nothing at all in the Bill that could force them to implement those recommendations.
According to one briefing by the ICD to the portfolio committee - I remember well how it was revealed - the number of complaints received against the SAPS had increased from 5 000 the previous year to over 6 000. Deaths in police custody as a result of police action had also increased from 792 to 912 over the same period. At the same time the SAPS was less and less inclined to bother to act on the ICD recommendations. Indeed they implemented just 58% of them and threw the rest into the trash. I watched in horror as that figure dropped to 42%. The last time I asked, the SAPS were implementing just 10% of those recommendations. The recommendations represent hours and hours of hard work on the part of professional investigators. The SAPS today treats the outcomes of those investigations with total contempt.
So, what exactly were they ignoring? Well, in just one year we learnt that criminal conduct by police had increased by 24%, misconduct by 6% and deaths in police custody by 15%. On numerous occasions the deaths in police custody were only learned about by the ICD when they read about it in the newspapers - newspapers which are currently still allowed to report on such travesties.
Indeed, every year the ICD receives an increased number of complaints. What is of particular interest is the fact that the ICD is one of the best kept secrets in the country. The Ministry has kept the ICD as close guarded a secret as one might expect some people to keep a mistress or an illegitimate child. It has been suggested that accountability and oversight were being increasingly neglected. I would say the neglect itself was criminal
In 2005, 22 police officers - the most in six years - had been reported to the ICD for allegedly raping members of the public, including children. It would be shocking even if one of our police officers had done that. But they were accused of such acts. What was just as shocking was that apparently their colleagues, other SAPS members, covered up for them. The result was that not one of the 22 had ever been charged or convicted.
Police officers were reportedly hiding evidence against their colleagues so that charges were withdrawn. In other cases police officers were arrested only to be released on petty cash bail amounts. At the same time the ICD told us that this was just the tip of the iceberg.
An example of how guilty members of the SAPS are allowed to return to duty was reported where a constable who was found guilty of indecently assaulting a gang-rape victim was back at work the next week. During the 2006-07 financial year, a total number of 707 SAPS employees were criminally charged for aiding escapees. Of those 707, only 14 were suspended. Of those 14 suspensions, only six were found guilty, and one resigned. Presumably we were to believe that the other prisoners mastered the art of teleportation.
The manipulation of crime statistics alone has certainly never been properly tackled, and yet one must come back again and again to the unthinkable. We are also referring to instances where citizens are shot, beaten, raped, killed or tortured by SAPS members or gang-raped in cells or indeed women put in men's cells and left to be gang-raped overnight. It was horrific to learn of the travesty of justice for one of those women. The two officers on duty who locked her in the males-only cell were served a sentence of dismissal, suspended for six months. That meant that they were back at work the next day and faced no loss of income, demotion or any other penalty.
The value placed by the SAPS on this woman's life, body and wellbeing was so contemptuously dismissive that it made women all over the country fear for their own safety and terrified that, should they find themselves locked up for an unpaid traffic fine or any other petty offence, they may suffer the same fate. They were asking if this was what women could hope to expect from the SAPS.
As for males, how many men have been raped in police cells because proper and regular cell checks were not conducted? The message sent out to the general public and to other SAPS members here was that they would keep their jobs, regardless of how negligent they were and how many people suffered because they failed in their duty.
So, it comes as no surprise that some SAPS members take bribes, lose dockets and refuse to open cases with impunity. After all, what actual risk was there that anything serious would happen to them? A report published by the Centre for Violence and Reconciliation stated that when asked what the worst thing was that would happen to them if they were caught taking a bribe, 6% of the SAPS members replied that nothing would happen to them and 32% stated that they might get a written warning.
The SAPS members do not perceive that there is any real risk of serious repercussions if caught failing in their duty. If you did wrong, you had very little to fear, until today. What incentive has there been for the public to report incidents of abuse when little action was taken against police members in the wrong? This lack of firm action not only undermined the morale of good cops - and there is a vast majority - but it also discouraged people from co-operating with the police, until today.
Even when the SAPS management went to the extraordinary length of suspending a member, they were suspended on full pay, and the investigation would then be stalled. These investigations took months, if not years, thereby costing taxpayers millions. At that stage, only 2% of SAPS employees criminally charged with assisting in the escapes from police cells, for example, were ever suspended. And when I last checked, we were looking at R90 million having been spent on the salaries of suspended SAPS members.
At the time when public confidence in the police was decreasing, these figures should have been setting off alarm bells among senior SAPS management. Instead, when questioned about the low dismissal rate of police criminally charged with rape, murder and armed robbery, the then SAPS Director of Communications, Selby Bokaba, stated that "the SA Police Service disciplined members in other ways besides dismissal". One law for the police and another for the rest of us.
The ICD did the best it could under the most impossible circumstances, which included a lack of co-operation from the SAPS, inadequate funding and a high staff turnover due to salaries. The SAPS simply did not take matters of police discipline seriously. Ironically, during the provincial "shutdown- the-Scorpions" hearings packed with bussed-in ANC members, claims were made from the floor that there were still housebreakings, rapes and attacks, and thus this elite crime-fighting unit should be shut down. This was ironic because of the confirmed presence of police members within the SAPS who had been found guilty of offences on active duty while it was them, and not the Scorpions, who should have been dealing with those types of matters.
The latest SAPS annual report revealed that the police had set aside R7,5 billion for civil legal claims against the department, equivalent to 18% of the budget. Indeed, the civil claims increased by 31% in just 12 months. These included assault, shootings, damage to property, police actions and the like. It became obvious that the inability of the SAPS to hold its own officers to account constituted one of the most significant impediments to expanding and improving the quality of policing. My attempts to introduce a private member's Bill to radically empower and expand the role of the ICD were put on hold over and over again. But today, finally, we see some action aimed at cleaning the dirt out of the SAPS and polishing up a badge that has been badly tarnished. Virtually every proposal in my private member's Bill has been incorporated into the legislation.
The time for empty rhetoric is over. This Bill gives the power to the civilian body to oversee our police. The DA will support this Bill - a Bill we have worked on so well together in the portfolio committee. But I must raise the issue again that the head of the ICD - soon to be Ipid - should be at the same level as the National Police Commissioner. Within the context of a ranked structure psyche, not having this situation could and probably will lead to problems of attempted noncompliance.
It may be too late for the woman allegedly raped by police some 10 months ago in Knysna - to date no identity parade has be held. It may be too late for the three students in King Williams Town driven off the road by student police, terribly injured and then robbed at gunpoint. It may be too late for the wildlife officer left by drunken officers to be gang-raped by 20 men overnight in Northern KwaZulu-Natal. But this Bill is certainly going to give this watchdog the bite it needs and should have been given long ago. Thank you. [Applause.]