Police Integrity in South Africa

Sanja Kutnjak Ivkovich, Adri Sauerman, Andrew Faull, Michael E. Meyer, Gareth Newham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138639652
• eBook ISBN: 9781317266907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science
• Index: Literature

Policing in South Africa has gained notoriety through its extensive history of oppressive law enforcement. In 1994, as the country's apartheid system was replaced with a democratic order, the new government faced the significant challenge of transforming the South African police force into a democratic police agency—the South African Police Service (SAPS)—that would provide unbiased policing to all the country's people. More than two decades since the initiation of the reforms, it appears that the SAPS has rapidly developed a reputation as a police agency beset by challenges to its integrity.

This book offers a unique perspective by providing in-depth analyses of police integrity in South Africa. It is a case study that systematically and empirically explores the contours of police integrity in a young democracy. Using the organizational theory of police integrity, the book analyzes the complex set of historical, legal, political, social, and economic circumstances shaping police integrity. A discussion of the theoretical framework is accompanied by the results of a nationwide survey of nearly 900 SAPS officers, probing their familiarity with official rules, their expectations of discipline within the SAPS, and their willingness to report misconduct. The book also examines the influence of the respondents' race, gender, and supervisory status on police integrity.

Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, policing, sociology, political science, as well as to police administrators interested in expanding their knowledge about police integrity and enhancing it in their organizations.

Chapter 1
Studying police integrity in South Africa

A democratic police for South Africa

The year 1994 was critical in the recent history of South Africa and a turning point in the lives of the country’s citizens. The decades-old apartheid regime had gradually crumbled and was replaced in April of that year by a new, representative government established after the country’s first democratic elections. Enthusiasm for Nelson Mandela, then the leader of the African National Congress (ANC) and the first black South African president, and his ANC-led coalition government abounded across the country. In a 1995 survey of 2,000 black residents, more than 80% of respondents agreed that Mandela was leading the country “very well” or “fairly well” (Duke, 1995). He was popular among the majority of white citizens too; a survey of 920 white residents revealed that more than 60% approved of Mandela’s leadership (Duke, 1995).

This overwhelming support for the government extended to the police as well; about three-quarters of the South African respondents participating in the World Values Survey from 1994 to 1998 stated that they had a substantial degree of confidence in the police (Boateng and Lee, 2018). Considered against more recent opinion polls, this was the highest level of confidence in the police during any post-apartheid period (Boateng and Lee, 2018). During apartheid, the South African Police were used as an enforcer of the government’s discriminatory laws and subsequently oppressed the majority race groups, while the minority white population could generally rely on paramilitary police protection and services. It is not surprising that blacks expressed much lower levels of confidence in the police during apartheid’s final years (1981–1993) and much higher levels of confidence in the police in the immediate post-apartheid period (e.g., 1994–1998) than whites did (Boateng and Lee, 2018).

President Mandela and the first democratically elected government that took office in 1994 chartered a path to transform the South African Police into an organization respectful of all citizens’ human rights, regardless of race (e.g., Gastrow and Shaw, 2001; Rauch, 2000; Jensen, 2014). At the dawn of what was soon called the “new South Africa,” a police agency that would provide services to all residents was a powerful idea. A substantial change, both symbolic and operational, occurred with the merging of apartheid state’s 11 police agencies, and the rebranding of the South African Police (SAP) into the South African Police Service (Makda et al., 2012; Van Graan and Ukpere, 2012). In addition to a dramatic change in the way policing has been carried out across the country, a number of scholars believe that the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1995—entrusted to investigate human rights violations committed by all sides during the apartheid period—further reaffirmed the rationale for strong support of the South African Police Service (e.g., Alexander et al., 2005; Vora and Vora, 2004; Wiebelhaus-Brahm, 2010).

However, the surge in black residents’ confidence in the police immediately following apartheid’s demise did not last long (Boateng and Lee, 2018). Compared to the levels of support during the first years of democracy, the most recent World Values Survey (2005 to 2014) revealed that only about 52% of South Africans surveyed—barely half—expressed confidence in the police (Boateng and Lee, 2018). Similar results were found in a 2007 survey of public confidence in South African public institutions (Roberts, 2008), where only 39% of the respondents “trusted” or “strongly trusted” the police. The results of the 2015 Afrobarometer survey (Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, 2017) further reveal the relatively low levels of support for police in recent times: 54% of the respondents stated that they do not trust police at all or trust them “just a little.” The results of the 2018 Afrobarometer (Plus 94 Research, 2018)—the most recent Afrobarometer available—are even more discouraging: Two thirds (66%) of respondents expressed no trust in police at all or stated that they had “just a little” trust.

Empirical studies suggest that the decline in confidence in the police was not sudden. Instead, confidence in the SAPS withered away over time, from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s. The percentage of respondents with confidence in the police started to decrease from about three-quarters in the immediate post-apartheid period (74% in 1994–1998), to about two-thirds in the early 2000s (60% in 1999–2004), to barely one-half in the late 2000s and the early 2010s (52%; 2005–2014; Boateng and Lee, 2018). Similarly, data from Statistics South Africa show a decline in satisfaction with police service, from a 64.2% approval in 2011 to 54.2% in 2017–2018 (Stats SA, 2011, p. 23, 2018, p. 86). Conversely viewed, the percentage of respondents who stated that they do not have confidence in police has increased from about one-quarter (27%) in the immediate post-apartheid period (1994–1998), to over one-third (40%) in the middle period (1999–2004), to close to half (48%) in the most recent period (2005–2014).

Clearly, enthusiasm for the new democratic police has waned. The pressing question is what prompted this decline in confidence. Because a strand of extant research has indicated that citizens’ perceptions of the police agency’s zeal to deal with crime are related to the citizens’ evaluations of the police (e.g., Boateng, 2019), one explanation may lie in South Africa’s very high violent crime rates (e.g., UNODC, 2019). To be sure, the extent to which the citizenry relates evaluations of the police with crime rates is far from clear in the South African context. For example, Faull (2010, pp. 39–40) found in the discussions with civilian focus-groups that participants were not as interested in the police who were effective in “fighting crime” as they were in the police who were “polite and respectful.” However, using survey analysis, Bradford and colleagues later found that fighting crime and respectful policing were considered equally important to South Africans (Bradford et al., 2014). More recently, Bello and Steyn (2019) found negative perceptions of the police among a sample of university students, based both on students’ perceptions and experiences of corruption and abuse, as well as perceived ineffectiveness in relation to crime.

Moreover, the feasibility of the relevance of the SAPS is challenged by the crime rates themselves. Specifically, although South Africa’s murder rate is still very high compared to most other countries (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2019), the post-apartheid period was not characterized by a sharp increase in murder. In fact, murder had been increasing from the mid-1970s until 1994, and declined substantially from 1994 to 2011 (Kriegler and Shaw, 2016a; UNODC, 2019, p. 25). Specifically, the murder rate in 2019 was 36.4 per 100,000 residents, about one-half of the murder rate of 78 per 100,000 recorded in 1993 (Dixon, 2018; SAPS, 2019). Kriegler and Shaw (2016b, p. 1) reasoned in 2016 that “the past two decades have shown unprecedented improvement in the physical safety of the vast majority of people in the country [emphasis added].” Despite this improvement in safety since 1994, surveys conducted since the late 1990s show roughly half of South Africans consistently believing that crime has increased (Pharoah, 2008; Stats SA, 2018). According to 2017 opinion polls, a common perception held that the ANC government with Jacob Zuma as president had been doing a poor job in addressing South Africa’s crime problems: 77% of Afrobarometer respondents believed Zuma’s government was controlling crime “fairly badly” or “very badly” (Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, 2017).

While the country’s endemic crime may damage public perceptions of police, an equally plausible reason for the decline in confidence may be related to perceptions of widespread misconduct in government in general and the police in particular. Studies indicate that trust in, and the legitimacy of, the police are generated through fair, community-oriented, and inclusive policing (Trinkner et al., 2016). Hence, perceptions of police officers’ misconduct could represent a strong impediment to public trust in, and confidence of, the police. The 2017 Afrobarometer findings (Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, 2017, p. 8) indicate a negative relation between perceptions of corruption and trust. A great majority of the respondents (83%) included in the 2015 opinion poll (Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, 2017) believed that corruption had increased in the previous year, though this number declined to 65% in 2018 (Plus 94 Research, 2018), possibly as a result of Zuma’s maligned presidency having ended. Furthermore, about one-half of the citizens included in the 2017 survey responded that “all” or “most” police officers (48%) were corrupt. In 2018, this increased slightly to 49% (Plus 94 Research, 2018). The corresponding fraction of respondents assessing judges and tax collectors as corrupt in 2017 was substantially smaller, about 25% (Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, 2017), increasing to 32% in 2018 (Plus 94 Research, 2018).

Perceptions that police misconduct is widespread in South Africa and the firsthand and vicarious experiences with police misconduct further erode the SAPS’s legitimacy. A 2001 study found that the primary reason respondents thought policing services had deteriorated was that “the police are corrupt” (Louw and Pelser, 2001), while of the 25% of Afrobarometer respondents who requested help from police in the year preceding the 2018 survey, 12% said that they paid a bribe, gave a gift, or did a favor to get their assistance. Of the 27% who interacted with the police at a checkpoint, during a traffic stop, investigation, or similar encounter, 26% said that they gave a bribe, gift, or favor to avoid a problem (Plus 94 Research, 2018). Similarly, the National Victims of Crime Survey 2017–2018 revealed that, of the 8% of victims who experienced corruption, 12% experienced it in “policing” and 61% in “traffic” contexts (Statistics South Africa, 2018, p. 63).¹ Empirical research further demonstrates that perceptions of police corruption and lowered confidence in the police may be related. One of the top two reasons for low levels of trust identified by Grobler (2013, p. 92) was the fact that the respondents experienced police misconduct.

The problem is further aggravated by the belief among the respondents that reports of corruption would not be investigated by the government (Plus 94 Research, 2016). In the end, there is a widely shared perception that governmental officials, including the police, are “above the law” and that they do not face the punishment they deserve. The 2015 Afrobarometer demonstrated that two-thirds of respondents agreed that officials who commit crimes either “often” or “always” go unpunished (compared to a belief that about one-third of ordinary citizens go unpunished; Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, 2017).

If police misconduct in South Africa is as systematic and widespread as some studies suggest (e.g., Grobler, 2013), the level of trust the police enjoy is undoubtedly adversely affected. One victim of a police assault explained that the attack “completely changed my idea of cops—I’m now scared of them” (Grobler, 2013, p. 45). Another citizen, whom police forced to run back and forth across a busy road when he refused to pay them a bribe, reported that the experience left him feeling “like beating them” whenever he saw the police (Faull, 2010, p. 37).

Whether the South African public really is fearful of its police, as 35% seemed to be according to one study (Grobler, 2013, p. 27), they are undoubtedly less likely to go to the police to repo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Lists of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Studying police integrity in South Africa
• 2 The origin and functions of the police in South Africa: from pre-colonialism to democracy
• 3 Transition to a police service: from enforcer to protector
• 4 South African policing through normative and legal boundaries
• 5 Policing the police: internal control of police misconduct
• 6 Curtailing the code of silence
• 7 Apartheid aftershock: race, police, and police integrity
• 8 Gender (in)equality within the SAPS
• 9 Police integrity across rank and file
• 10 Police integrity in the South African context
• Index