07 Jun 2007: ISS Today: South Africa: Cops Keep Jobs After Cell Gang-Rape

7 June 2007: South Africa: Cops Keep Jobs After Cell Gang-Rape
The Star, 5 June 2007

 

Earlier in the year many people were shocked to learn that, in what appeared to be a case of extreme malice or gross negligence, members of the South African Police Service had locked a woman in a male cell.  As a result, she was raped by the male suspects occupying that cell at the time.  According to the story the woman and her boyfriend had been arrested on ‘charges of drinking in public’, which is, indeed, a criminal offence. Not surprisingly, the original offence has been overshadowed by the subsequent one.

 

This incident raises a number of issues. One wonders, for instance, whether  it was really necessary for the couple to be kept in the holding cells.  Was it not possible or even prudent to be more creative by exercising the powers that members of the SAPS have to summons and warn the suspects to come to court on a particular day?  Or were the suspects so drunk that it did not make sense to warn them to appear in court?  Although these questions deal with the merits of a specific case and the true facts are known only to the parties (SAPS members involved and the suspects), this points to a bigger issue.  That is, would some creativity on the part of the SAPS not go a long way towards averting the overcrowding of the police holding cells.  Should the norm and practice not be that keeping of suspects in holding cells should be a measure of last resort?  It is quite disturbing to see that some SAPS members prefer keeping people in the cells even though they have other ways of ensuring court attendance.  

 

Members of the Metro Police also seem to follow this line of thinking.  An example will illustrate this:   in January 2007, I received a frantic call from a young lady whose boyfriend was ‘missing’.  He had left for work the previous day, but had not returned home.  As it turned out, he had been arrested by members of the Metro Police for illegally crossing a free way (R21 in Gauteng).  He was arrested in the morning (at about 10:00am), kept in the Metro Police car and later taken to the police station, where he was booked, and released only the following day.  What is worrying, however, is that members of the SAPS on duty allegedly told him that he had received enough punishment and would know that crossing the highway is forbidden.   One could go beyond the law enforcement function of the SAPS and the Metro Police and question the appropriateness of forbidding highway crossing in situations where there are no alternative routes, but that is a matter beyond the scope and intent of this article.  It has to be said, however, that if the allegations this suspect makes are true, it enforces the view that in some instances police do not arrest with an intention of bringing the accused before court, but to punish.  Moreover, it did not make sense to me that the suspect had to sleep in the holding cells only to be released the following day with a summons.  This, I argued, could and, perhaps, should have been done on the day of his arrest.

 

Back to the Mpumalanga case of ‘gang-rape’.  Apparently, the explanation given by the police officers who put the woman in a male holding cell is that the lights in the cell were ‘not working’.  Yet they proceeded to put people in that cell without making an alternative arrangement for light and/or putting extra security measures in place. How does a police officer who respects the human dignity of fellow citizens and is charged with protecting them make a mistake like this? To me the story would be shocking enough if it ended there, but it does not.  The officers who were supposed to make hourly checks did not.  Had they done so, it is possible that they could have averted or stopped the rape.  And they were not even charged for this negligence. 

 

While the conduct of the police officers is to be condemned as it does a lot of damage to the police service, I think the steps taken by the SAPS are insufficient and, it could be argued, do more damage to the service than the original act.   The two officers were found guilty and allowed to keep their jobs on condition that they ‘do not commit the same offence in the next five months’.   This is light punishment.  Taken with the fact that those who failed to do hourly checks were not even charged,  it calls into question the seriousness with which the SAPS take the safety and protection of those in their custody.  One wonders what protection the alleged rapists themselves had against each other.  Put differently, what protection does a suspect in a holding cell have against being harassed and/or raped if police, like these two officers, can just throw them into a cell with no lights and without knowing who else is in there?  Such incidents undermine public confidence and trust in the police at the very time when the service’s leadership is hard at work trying to promote a positive image.  Moreover, it is incidents like this that open the Minister of Safety and Security to legal action.

 

 Boyane Tshehla, Head, Crime and Justice Programme, ISS Tshwane (Pretoria)