Publications
Partners
Pretoria - Members of the SA Police Service play a major role in perpetrating serious violent crime, the SA Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) said on Wednesday.
"There are simply too many reports and too many allegations to reach any other conclusion," SAIRR chief executive Frans Cronje said in Pretoria.
He was releasing a report, titled "Broken Blue Line 2", a follow-up on the initial project released in 2011.
"Police officers will often use their policing powers, as well as official equipment, to perpetrate crimes. In the case of cloned officers, criminal gangs appear to benefit from internal support from real officers," said Cronje.
"It is with good reason that members of the public often do not trust the police and that some are even afraid of the police. South Africans can no longer be sure that when reporting a crime they are not reporting to a criminal in uniform."
"Broken Blue Line 2" covers incidents recorded from April 2011 to January 2015.
‘Tip of the iceberg’
Regarding the methodology, Cronje said SAIRR analysts identified 100 cases of alleged police involvement in serious and violent crimes.
"These 100 cases studies were written up and then analysed in order to look for trends or patterns of behaviour," he said.
"We then tested those results against two sources of information on disciplinary action against police officers implicated in criminality."
According to the report the 100 cases were just the "tip of the iceberg".
The 2011 study found that police involvement in serious and violent crime was not limited to "isolated incidents", but was part of a general pattern of behaviour across the country.
