Shoot-to-kill, police or not police

SA a step closer to anarchy

When a person in South Africa finds himself/herself in a desperate enough situation to seek police assistance, that individual earns sympathy and pity indeed. While that conundrum is all but new in post-Apartheid South Africa - after all, nearly 1.5 million white South Africans have packed their belongings and left the country in the past 8 years alone - the situation has become ever more grievous during the tenures of the past 3 presidents of the nation.

Looking for help from police is a perilous venture for a white South African nowadays. Such individual is well advised to sport acute awareness for the possibility that the coppers who have been alerted to an emergency are not necessarily policemen but random thugs in stolen uniforms, and even stolen or 'adapted' private cars remodelled into patrol cars. Such 'first aiders' have become known to rob, to take hostages for ransom, to rape, to abuse and injure and even to kill victims of preceding crimes or accidents.

The common South African knows about these dangers and will try to outsmart the mayhem by approaching a police precinct. Once there the individual in desperate need for help will encounter regularly one or a combination of these scenarios:

1) Police staff is either on drugs or drunk or asleep;
2) Police station is nearly deserted or severely under-staffed (especially during the night, as regular personnel conducts clandestine operations to stop and rob drivers, ask for kick-backs or confiscate the car under pretense;
3) Staff is either incompetent or uninterested in the complaint or the call for help;
4) Staff refuses to leave the precinct to investigate "because the situation is too dangerous outside"
5) Staff interrupts to negotiate a 'fee' - in truth a bribe - to continue taking the report;
6) Assertive complainant faces arrest and will be held overnight in custody, sometimes to be released only in lieu of a payment to fatten the copper's paycheque;
7) Staff reassures the person seeking help to return at a later, more opportune time
8) Staff expresses disbelief of the person's story, subjecting him to an 'intense' interrogation paired with verbal and physical abuse;
9) Person is required to provide details of home address and personal circumstances for the purpose of giving the staff detailed indications when there will be the best time for a home invasion and burglary in future;

The reason why so many precincts in the country are either under-staffed or deserted during the hours of 6pm and 6am is that many coppers are out on the street in commission of crimes ranging from robbery of drivers - routinely at gunpoint - to murder during home invasions.

The brutal nature of crimes in South Africa - more than 18,000 people have been murdered last year - has provoked now the newly appointed chief of the nation's police - himself an ex-criminal and a crony of President Zuma - to introduce a 'policy' of shoot-to-kill for police. The policy expressively stipulates that "police need to be freed from the restraints to have to account for the use of deadly force against criminals," or whoever the police perceive as criminal.

As a result several incidents have been reported since October 1st (when the new "Shoot-to-kill" orders were given) where police opened fire on innocent and unsuspecting civilians either on foot or in a car. So far five innocents have been fatally shot, among them a mother of 2 who was in a slow moving car when police opened fire and hit the car - and its three passengers - with some 40 bullets. The driver, a pilot of the SA Air Force, lambasted the police for shooting at a car ready to stop and for them fleeing the scene after the shooting.

A core problem is that more than 4,000 unregistered vehicles belong to the nation's police force who have full powers to make random stops. Criminal gangs utilize this policy and are responsible now for nearly 60% of all incidents where a driver has been stopped (and usually harassed, abused, threatened and robbed).

The US State Department is considering to issue a travel advisory for Americans, with the EU and Britain possibly to follow. This would deal a severe blow to South Africa's efforts to lure tourists and visitors for next year's World Cup into the country.

I am currently on assignment in Geneva and Paris