Dylan Bettencourt
A database with the killings of the South African Police Service (SAPS) has been made public and the report shows the police kill at least one person every day.
Since the beginning of 2012, the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) has reported more than 380 individual cases of killings perpetrated by the police every year which averages out at more than one person per day.
The report displayed police killings along with issues of police brutality and corruption with over 47,000 reports registered on the system between 2012 and 2020, as per the Police Accountability Tracker dashboard.
The total number of police killings since records began being kept on the matter in 1997 surpassed 10,000 in 2020 and has continued increasing since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to GroundUp.
IPID registers many other issues raised regarding the police which include assault, shootings, rape and corruption and published data suggests that an eight-year period between April 2012 and March 2020 included 3,000 killings made by the police.
A dashboard created by Viewfinder allows those who reported incidents to track the progress of their complaint and are able to collect a progress report. While many will be left disappointed, it is a step in the right direction.
Of the 47,984 incidents reported on the dashboard, only 1,553 convictions were made with a disappointing amount of only 194 dismissals.
Police officers in any part of the world put themselves directly in the line of fire and not all incidents reported are transgressions, but a survey done in 2020 showed many officers are unsure of what they are permitted to do.
In the survey taken by around 900 SAPS police officers, one in four officers were unsure if “shooting an unarmed stranger in the back” was permitted or not.
One third of the respondents didn’t know if “striking a handcuffed man in the kidneys” was a violation of the SAPS rules or not.
It is no secret, as the data suggests, that many police officers go unpunished for abuse of power. IPID has promised they will develop a plan to ensure more officers in the country are held liable for their actions.
Image source: @Firearms
