Walking the Talk? The South African Police Service Anti-Corruption Strategy

The South African Police Service has struggled in the past to implement its anti-corruption strategies. Can it avoid repeating those mistakes and effectively implement its latest plan to fight corruption?

Published on 09 November 2011 in ISS Today

Brian Rose, Intern, Crime and Justice Programme, ISS Pretoria Office  

Recently, on 15 September 2011 the South African Police Service (SAPS) presented its newly refined Anti-Corruption Strategy to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Police. This new strategy is the latest in a long line of anti-corruption strategies developed by the SAPS to address a corruption problem that has continually plagued the organisation. Previous anti-corruption strategies failed to significantly reduce corruption for a number of reasons, including a lack of buy-in from SAPS managers and the simple fact that the strategies were never effectively implemented. It is encouraging that SAPS executives continue to recognise corruption as a serious problem that requires a deliberate strategy if it is to be effectively dealt with. However, if they hope to translate that concern into action they must effectively implement an anti-corruption strategy.

South Africa is not alone in its struggle against police corruption. Police work is universally acknowledged to be difficult and police officials around the world are granted coercive authority so as to enable them to enforce the law. This coercive power, however, is most often exercised outside the direct supervision of superiors making police officials uniquely susceptible to the temptations of corruption. To maintain professional integrity it is therefore necessary for police organisations to constantly be developing innovative strategies to deal with corruption.

Importantly, the latest SAPS strategy contains both proactive and reactive components. In line with proactive steps to prevent corruption, the SAPS will seek to foster a culture of police professionalism and integrity. To this end, the strategy seeks to establish a new Integrity Management Framework that will include improvements in anti-corruption training, providing managerial support to SAPS members in preventing and reporting corruption and the establishment of a Centre for Service Excellence to coordinate both reports from the public of police misconduct as well as commendations for good service. Additionally, on 9 December 2011 the SAPS plans to launch its internal “Look Out” campaign to provide police members with detailed explanations of what actions constitute corruption, the consequences of those actions and how honest SAPS members can safely report corrupt colleagues.

While an important focus of the strategy will be on preventing corruption, it does not neglect the need to identify and address incidents of corruption that do occur. The strategy therefore also includes new initiatives aimed at improving the detection of corruption, increasing the efficiency of investigations to bring corrupt officials before the courts and to resolve systemic weaknesses that allowed corruption to occur in the first place.

In theory the new Anti-Corruption Strategy possesses many promising elements, but in the words of Winston Churchill “however beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results." The SAPS has developed anti-corruption strategies in the past and the common denominator of their failure to reduce corruption was that they were never adequately implemented by the senior management component of the organisation.

The failure of previous anti-corruption strategies becomes clear when research pointing to unacceptable levels of police corruption is compared to the low number of corruption cases opened against SAPS members. National surveys conducted by Afrobarometer in 2006 and 2008 found that 46% of citizens perceived all or most police officials to be engaged in corruption. In 2009 the Institute for Security Studies conducted a survey of three Gauteng police stations. The study found that 85% of police respondents believed that corruption was a serious problem in the SAPS generally. However, in this year only 362 SAPS personnel, or 0,002% of SAPS personnel, were charged under the Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act (2004). A cursory look at these results immediately raises questions concerning the effectiveness of the SAPS anti-corruption strategies in place at the time.

In its 2008/2009 Annual Report the SAPS admitted that it struggled to implement previous anti-corruption strategies, particularly due to lack of support from senior management and inadequate monitoring of implementation requirements. In an apparent attempt to address the failures of the past, the Annual Performance Plan 2011/2012 states that:

The implementation of the Anti-corruption Strategy will be driven by Management at all levels through the implementation of specific, measurable, attainable, time-bound anti-corruption action plans designed to ensure the integrated application of the four pillars of the Anti-corruption Strategy.

The promising elements of the new anti-corruption strategy combined with a new commitment to rectify the failures of the past should be encouraging to all South Africans.

The urgent need to effectively implement an anti-corruption strategy stems from the fact that corruption destroys the healthy community/police relationship that is essential to successful democratic policing. Research conducted around the world has found that civilian perceptions of police legitimacy, and their willingness to cooperate with police, relies more upon fair and courteous treatment than whether or not they believe the police are effective “crime fighters.” A SAPS believed to be corrupt will quickly lose the trust and support of the community it serves thereby making its law enforcement responsibilities that much harder.