In response to a parliamentary question by Economic Freedom Fighters representative Mathibe Mohlala, the Minister of Police, Senzo Mchunu, outlined the legal framework governing the use of force, emphasising that police officials are authorised only to use the minimum level of force that is reasonably necessary and proportional to the situation.

Minister Mchunu referenced several legislative instruments, including Section 13(3) of the South African Police Service Act (1995) and Section 49 of the Criminal Procedure Act (1977), alongside the common law principle of private defence. He stressed that these frameworks set strict limits on the circumstances under which force, particularly lethal force, can be lawfully applied.

To further guide officers in the field, the SAPS introduced National Instruction 1 of 2016, which details the legal requirements and operational procedures to be followed during arrests involving the use of force. The instruction also places accountability on police commanders to ensure that personnel are properly trained on these principles.

“The use of lethal force is a last resort authorised in law,” the Minister said. “Police officials are trained to use such force only when it is necessary, and always in accordance with the principles of reasonableness and proportionality.”

All incidents involving police use of force that result in death or injury must be reported to the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID), which conducts independent investigations into each case. These investigations are designed to assess the lawfulness of police actions and can lead to both criminal charges and disciplinary proceedings where misconduct is identified.

In her question, Mohlala expressed concern about the apparent reliance on lethal force rather than prioritising lawful arrests and prosecutions, especially given that “the real masterminds behind organised crimes continue to operate freely, leaving working-class communities in perpetual fear.”

Responding to this, Mchunu stated that SAPS applies various operational strategies aimed at identifying and arresting all individuals involved in organised crime, including ringleaders. He reaffirmed that the objective of any police operation is to bring perpetrators to justice through lawful processes.

The statement comes amid heightened public debate over police conduct, especially in communities most affected by violent crime. While the government maintains that the current legal and procedural safeguards are robust, critics argue that stronger oversight and more transparent accountability mechanisms are needed to ensure trust in law enforcement.

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The analysis provides context to the acquittal by a SAPS disciplinary process of eight VIP Protection Unit officers for assaulting members of the public. In July 2023, officers were filmed dragging a driver and two passengers out of a vehicle, repeatedly kicking them as they lay on the ground, then rapidly leaving the scene.

Although the eight police members face criminal charges for the assaults, the SAPS is unable or unwilling to convict any of them despite the video recording of the incident. The criminal case against the eight officials resumed on 10 June.

The decision not to sanction police in a case with such strong evidence will encourage SAPS members to disregard standards regarding the use of force. Excessive and unnecessary force will become even more entrenched than it already is, with the police seen by the public as merely another group of thugs and criminals.

The failure to uphold professional standards undermines efforts to build public respect and trust in the police. The SAPS has a legal duty to prevent excessive and unnecessary force. Neglecting this obligation encourages disrespect for the law across the entire spectrum of policing in South Africa. It is also an affront to those police who strive to strengthen public trust in the police by promoting the professionalism of the SAPS.

The use of excessive force is not a problem of a few ‘bad apples’ but a routine part of everyday policing in many places across South Africa.

International and South African examples of police brutality show that the foremost perpetrators are frequently active frontline officers. Senior commanders, particularly those with a limited grasp of effective policing, often rely on these officers to get results, so there is little possibility that action will be taken against them.

Faced with resource and personnel constraints, it may seem easier for the SAPS to neglect constitutional provisions forbidding torture and instead support the public right ‘to be free from all forms of violence from either public or private sources.’

Because the criminal justice system is often seen as dysfunctional, many believe the police need to use excessive force in response to high levels of violent crime. Public expressions of support for the killing by police of suspects are one reflection of this. But this support encourages the deterioration of policing standards and is a poisoned chalice for the SAPS.

In the unlikely event that they are charged for ill-discipline, almost 80% of SAPS members will ultimately face no sanction (see graph). ISS analysis of data in SAPS annual reports and the Safety and Security Sectoral Bargaining Council (SSSBC) shows that 6 154 (77.4%) of 7 946 disciplinary cases against SAPS members ended without sanction.

Excessive force – from fairly routine assaults to more serious forms of torture – is far more widely tolerated in the SAPS than is officially acknowledged. Disciplinary sanctions aren’t often applied for these infringements. Other police offences such as corruption and rape are more likely to result in internal convictions.

The Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) received 3 176 reports of serious assault and 273 reports of torture in the 2023/24 year. The SAPS reports 55 disciplinary convictions for serious assault and 10 for the use of ‘unlawful force’ or other ill-treatment of a person in custody. It does not indicate the sanctions imposed for these offences.

Many victims believe there will be few consequences if they report assaults or torture by police and that it isn’t worth the trouble. Victims and their families are often not able to take legal action, partly because victims themselves may be under arrest for alleged crimes. Reported cases are likely just the tip of the iceberg.

And few victims of police assault or torture lay successful civil claims. The vast majority of these claims are for wrongful arrest, which lawyers find easier to prove than police violence. Most police members are not deterred by civil claims, as those that succeed are paid for by public money from the SAPS budget.

The trial of the eight VIP Protection Unit members resumes tomorrow. But accountability for the misuse of force by police is unlikely in the criminal courts, even when recorded on video. Proving a case beyond a reasonable doubt is a much higher standard of proof than in the SAPS disciplinary system. IPID and the National Prosecuting Authority often cannot meet this standard, particularly when the accused has a capable legal team.

At the SAPS Policing Summit in April, discussions consistently highlighted the weakness of the disciplinary system. Police serving in disciplinary hearings as presiding officers or prosecutors (employer representatives) are frequently poorly acquainted with relevant aspects of the law. This was confirmed at the summit by police trade unions, which often represent accused SAPS members.

The SAPS disciplinary system must set clear standards regarding police conduct. Many members allege that disciplinary measures are not consistently carried out and are strongly influenced by favouritism or other factors. Presiding officers may also be colleagues of those facing disciplinary charges.

South Africa’s police leaders should commit to upholding high standards of conduct and professionalism among their members. Doing so requires a more effective SAPS disciplinary system and a commitment to implementing policies that support the reasonable and necessary use of force, and prevent excessive force by police.

Written by David Bruce, Independent Researcher and ISS Consultant.

Republished with permission from ISS Africa. The original article can be found here.

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An estimated 6,100 closed mines are distributed across the country. Although closed, they are not sealed. Residual gold remains in these ruins, and is extracted by miners who come from across the region. They are mainly unlicensed or undocumented migrants, and work in groups that range from a few dozen individuals to highly organised teams of hundreds.

Television stations and social media feeds carried horrendous images of the emaciated figures of the living and the dead as they were brought to the surface in mid-January 2024, nearly six months after the operation was started.

The tales of what the police operation inflicted on these mineral gleaners are harrowing. Reports of illness and starvation, of weeks in fetid air next to decomposing corpses, as well as the eating of insects and even human flesh, were entered into evidence before the constitutional court. A case was brought before the court by an organisation seeking to halt the operation on human rights grounds.

This wasn’t the first siege undertaken as part of Operation Vala Umgodi. But it was the first sustained blockade.

What could lead to the adoption of nearly medieval military tactics in a nation with otherwise robust constitutional protections for human rights as well as strong regulations governing mine closure and rehabilitation? And why do so many South African citizens appear to agree with this brutal strategy? Who are the “criminals” captured as a result of such extreme measures?

I am an anthropologist and I’ve been studying the social life and history of South African gold mining for nearly three decades. I’ve also made a film with and about informal miners.

The problems posed by informal mining will not be solved by treating it as a question of criminality or border security. It must be understood in relation to the history of the formal industry, and in terms of regional and global economic forces. This includes the problem of demonetisation (the substitution of digital tokens for hard currency), rising rates of personal debt, exclusion from digital infrastructures and protracted local economic crises.

The world of the miners

Over the years I’ve come to know many individuals who have gone underground in search of what’s been left behind by large scale industrial mining. They come from the same places as did many of their forebears who worked in the formal industry. In its heyday South Africa’s mines employed nearly half a million people. They came from Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi, as well as the Eastern Cape of South Africa.

Some are former mine workers, now unemployed. Some are farmers or fishermen whose livelihoods have been made untenable by drought and floods, or by monetary and political crises at home.

These are the people on the lowest rung of informal mining’s ladder. Like most industries, this one is highly stratified. Above such desperate individuals are the criminal syndicates who traffic in arms, people, narcotics and gold. And, as journalists and even the World Gold Council acknowledge, they are enmeshed in webs of corruption. These include bankers, as well as management and security forces of formal mines, smelting and reclamation companies, buyers and traders, and smugglers who carry gold from South Africa to Dubai.

Those webs also include police and government officials with the authority to intervene. Or to profit handsomely for not intervening.

Yet, the police strategy and public sentiment in South Africa treat the gangsters and their virtually enslaved labourers as equally culpable for the economic, material and environmental devastation that afflicts the nation. And they largely ignore the depredations that resulted from the industry’s formal operations over a century and a half.

The context

The horrors in Stilfontein and elsewhere need to be understood in a global context. According to a 2024 report by the World Gold Council, 20% of the world’s newly mined gold comes from small scale and artisanal production. And an astonishing 80% of all the people who work in the gold sector worldwide do so as informal or artisanal mineworkers. Many work in the shadow of the law under extremely coercive circumstances.

In 2022, that meant about 20 million people were eking a living as small scale miners of gold. (Another 20 million or so work in similar fashion to obtain other minerals.) They, in turn, supported an estimated 270 million people. More people than live in Brazil, or about seven times the population of Canada.

These numbers reflect rapid growth in recent decades. The World Gold Council measures that upsurge from 1993, the year that triggered the era of globalisation with the fall of Soviet socialism and the emergence of new regionalisms (the North American Free Trade Agreement, the European Union).

What we see around the world today, in tariff wars, isolationalist nationalism and the vilification of migrants, can be traced to the same period, when capital began to fly around the world and multinational corporations began to shed their commitments to local communities of labourers.

South Africa’s story

Black workers in South Africa experienced this trend in acute ways.

The country’s mineral economy was defined by the compound system, in which mineworkers lived in single-sex hostels and travelled between the mines and their residential homes on short-term contract bases. Black workers were heavily dependent on the corporation for social goods that the state was not providing because of racial policies.

Over the past four decades many South African mining corporations, like those elsewhere, shrank their work forces and moved to subcontract labour for those remaining. In lieu of benefits, they offered workers more “freedom”. Many workers desired this. But freed from longer-term contracts and from the social goods extracted by unions, they also became vulnerable to other forces. And the HIV/AIDS epidemic afflicted communities with terrible strain.

Personal indebtedness rose dramatically. For those without documented citizenship or resident status, accessing credit meant turning to shadowy lenders, including gangs, who charged and enforced merciless interest rates. This in turn strengthened the power of the gangs, long part of the landscape in southern Africa.

The undocumented and the very poor have also often been forced into a realm of criminality where they depend on illegally mined and unminted gold. These are the people who are most easily preyed upon by armed criminal groups.

Popular mythology in South Africa attributes much violent crime to the “zama zamas” (the name means “to keep on trying” or “to gamble”). But there is no evidence of this.

In my observation, violence around the abandoned mines is mainly committed by gangs and their collaborators, who also coerce zama zamas in their underground labours, extracting from them the gold they manage to take from underground, charging security fees to enter shafts and to exit them, organising coerced prostitution, trafficking in child labour, and supplying the dynamite, the mercury, and the pneumatic drills in larger operations.

This is why the World Gold Council report is correct to speak of the exploitation of small scale and artisanal miners. It recommends that states prosecute the buyers, smelters and bankers, as well as political authorities who profit from this merciless economy.

Solutions

Laudable as these efforts to redirect prosecutorial zeal are, the solution to the problem of informal economies is not policing. Nor is it regulation.

In places where gold is found in surface deposits, licensing by the state can provide systems of oversight and a regulatory framework to protect workers. So can negotiated settlements with “criminal” gangs, who become more like corporate institutions in the process.

But in South Africa the possibility of self-organised mining appears to have passed. Rises in the price of gold have led to more intense and militarised competition among gangs. In addition, South Africa’s gold mines – the deepest in the world – aren’t hospitable sites for either licensing or decentralising strategies. It is too dangerous and too expensive to secure the thousands of miles of underground tunnels.

The solution must begin with massive regional economic repair, including debt relief for individuals and for sovereign states which can’t spend on social goods because of their interest obligations on foreign loans. It must include the stabilisation of local economies, and reinvestment in climate-resilient agriculture.

And migration needs to be rethought and decriminalised. The past of the gold mines is a history of migration. The future, shaped by climate change, will also be a story of migration. Above all, therefore, a change in consciousness is required.

This story was republished with permission from TheConversation, the original article can be found here.

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Our survey offers new evidence of how Africans experience and assess their police. It shows people often have to contend with demands for bribes from police officers. But assessments varied by country: in some, police were said to be helpful.

Afrobarometer currently surveys 39 of Africa’s 55 countries.

As researchers at Afrobarometer, we have published on police professionalism and other government institutions for several years.

Our analysis also reveals that negative perceptions of police professionalism and corruption go hand in hand with low public trust in the police, poor marks on government performance, and citizens’ sense of insecurity.
Encounters with police

While some citizens seek assistance from the police (to report a crime, for example), others might only encounter the police in less voluntary situations, such as at a checkpoint or traffic stop or during an investigation. Across the 39-country sample, only 13% of respondents said they had requested police assistance during the previous 12 months. Three times as many (40%) reported encountering the police in other situations.

Among respondents who asked for police assistance, more than half (54%) said it had been easy to get the help they needed. More than three-fourths found it easy in Burkina Faso (77%) and Mauritius (76%), though no more than half as many said the same in Malawi (37%), Madagascar (37%) and Sudan (33%).

Many respondents reported a police practice that was less than helpful: stopping drivers on the road without a valid reason. On average, 39% of Africans said the police “often” or “always” stopped drivers without good reason, in addition to 26% who said they “sometimes” did so. The practice is particularly widespread in Gabon (68% often/always) and Kenya (66%). In contrast, fewer than one in five respondents in Ethiopia (18%), Cabo Verde (16%) and Benin (16%) had this complaint.

Both seeking police assistance and being stopped on the road may be a prelude to being asked for money. Among respondents who said they had asked for police assistance during the previous year, 36% said they had had to pay a bribe, give a gift or do a favour to get the help they needed. This proportion reached astonishing levels in Liberia (78%), Nigeria (75%), Sierra Leone (72%) and Uganda (71%).

Similarly, among citizens who encountered the police in other situations, 37% said they had to pay a bribe to avoid a problem. Liberia (70%) again ranked worst, joined by Guinea (66%), Congo-Brazzaville (65%) and Uganda (64%). Seychelles and Cabo Verde performed best on both counts (1%-4%).

Considering how many Africans personally experience having to bribe the police, it may not be surprising that on average across 39 countries, the police were more widely seen as corrupt than civil servants, officials in the presidency, or any other public institutions or leaders the surveys asked about. Almost half (46%) of respondents said that “most” or “all” police officials were corrupt.

Police brutality

One of the harshest criticisms levelled against some police officers was that they used excessive force in their interactions with the people they were meant to serve and protect.

Almost four in 10 respondents (38%) said the police “often” or “always” used excessive force in managing protests or demonstrations. Another 27% said they “sometimes” did so. Only 29% said the police were “rarely” or “never” guilty of brutality in their handling of protesters. The perception of frequent police brutality against protesters was most common in Gabon (64% often/always) and was widespread in some countries that are scheduled to have national elections this year, including Senegal (60%), Guinea (51%) and Tunisia (45%).

Police professionalism

Do these popular perceptions add up to a police force that is seen as professional?

Only one-third (32%) of respondents said the police in their countries “often” or “always” operated in a professional manner and respected the rights of all citizens, while 32% said they “sometimes” and 34% said they “rarely” or “never” did.

In just five countries did more than half of the respondents think their police usually acted professionally: Burkina Faso (58%), Morocco (57%), Niger (55%), Benin (54%) and Mali (54%). Senegal ranked sixth, at just 50%. Fewer than one in five respondents saw police as usually professional in Sierra Leone (19%), Eswatini (19%), Kenya (18%), Congo-Brazzaville (17%) and Nigeria (13%).

Significance of findings

These findings raise questions about the quality of policing on the African continent, highlighting notably negative experiences and evaluations of the police in many – but not all – countries. For example, in Burkina Faso, Morocco and Benin, police scored relatively well across multiple performance indicators.

More broadly, our findings point to broad cross-country patterns of how police professionalism, integrity and respectful conduct are correlated with more positive citizen attitudes towards the police.

African governments looking to change the unfavourable public perceptions of the police – and of government performance in the fight against crime – might take a closer look at which dimensions of police performance matter in their country, and which better-performing police forces might have solutions to share.

Written by Matthias Krönke, Researcher, University of Cape Town and Thomas Isbell, Consultant, University of Cape Town, with contributions from Makanga Ronald Kakumba, researcher.

Republished with permission from The Conversation. The original article can be found here.

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