Type | Working Paper |
Title | Benign Neglect? The Politics and Practise of Controlling Police Corruption in South Africa |
Author(s) | |
Publication (Day/Month/Year) | 2008 |
URL | http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTABCDESOUAFR2008/Resources/DavidBruce.pdf |
Abstract | During the transition to democracy in South Africa in the early and mid-1990s considerable emphasis was placed on the creation of external oversight bodies, including committees of the national parliament and provincial legislatures, ‘secretariats’ linked to national and provincial executives, a complaints monitoring body with investigative powers called the Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD), and local structures composed of community members, called community police forums (CPFs) intended to perform an oversight function at police station level. At the same time, particularly since 2000, the political and institutional environment has been hostile to agencies orientated towards tackling police corruption. The South African Police Service (SAPS) AntiCorruption unit was disbanded in 2002. Moreover, moves are currently taken to disband the Directorate of Special Operations or ‘Scorpions’, the agency recently responsible for bringing the national commissioner of the SAPS to court on corruption charges. Despite a considerable array of oversight bodies, the overall trend in the recent period has been towards a weakening of the capacity to investigate police corruption. This paper looks at these developments, discussing the role of external oversight agencies in dealing with police corruption, and the reasons for the weakening of the main anti-corruption investigative agencies in South Africa. This discussion provides the basis for a general reflection of the political and institutional factors which support or hinder efforts to tackle police corruption in South Africa. |
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