A crime expert revealed on Tuesday that a widespread approach among the police in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal is to “shoot to kill” suspects during shootings.
Crime analyst and political and human rights activist Mary de Haas said: “These people who have been killed are suspects. They have not been convicted”, pointing out that police officers do not seem to be properly trained to shoot without killing suspected criminals.
Mary added that the training given to police officers is poorer and shorter than it used to be, while many recruits have made their way into the profession because of corruption.
“South Africans should realize that there is a constitutional crisis in policing and a breakdown of law and order that can only be resolved by immediate action by the President to remove the Minister of Police and set up an independent Police Board”, she continued.
Mrs de Haas also stressed that South Africa was grappling with the problem of gun control, which needed to be resolved as a matter of urgency, warning that “some of the weapons in circulation came from the police themselves and others from the ‘poorly regulated’ private security sector”.
For his part, Robbie Raburabu, spokesman for the Independent Police Investigation Directorate (IPID), stated that the province of Gauteng, which includes Johannesburg and Pretoria, tops the league table for the number of criminals killed by the police.
According to figures from the South African Police Service (SAPS), a total of 17 wanted criminals have been killed by police agencies in KwaZulu-Natal since January this year. More recently, police eliminated eight of Durban’s most wanted criminals in two separate incidents.