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.