The IPID was established after the ICD had collapsed due to its ineffectiveness. The IPID was established with few changes to upgrade it from the ICD. In the context of section 28 (1)(f) of the IPID mandate, the IPID is required to be assessed in terms of its successes and challenges.
A question was posed to the participants in this regard, and their responses varied. A few of the participants did not want to talk negatively about their organization, whereas others openly expressed their grievances with regards to the challenges they encountered when investigating cases of torture and assault. There was some convergence with regards to the responses about the challenges that were experienced.
The researcher asked the participants: “Do you think IPID has adequate capacity to address the problem of torture and assault in KwaZulu-Natal?” Some participants responded in an assertive manner, while others responded even before the interviewer could finish asking the question. All the participants indicated that the IPID institution was inadequately capacitated to address the huge number of criminal offences that it was tasked to investigate, and they further elaborated by mentioning different reasons as to why they thought the IPID was inadequately capacitated.
P-Inv-49 stated:
“No, not at all. When we are talking about resources at IPID, it’s something else.
Whether it’s torture or any other criminal offence, there are no resources. Even with personnel, we are far, far, far behind. Unfortunately the intake of torture and assault cases is very high and there are no resources.”
P-Inv-54 stated:
“Oh no, IPID… I don’t want to talk bad about IPID, but there is a problem with the budget, that is number one. So, yah… we don’t have enough resources. The ideal situation would be, IPID has got their own resources, own photographer everything done at IPID, but unfortunately, because of the budget we rely on stakeholders.”
P-Inv-48 contributed to the types of resources that are lacking:
“For lots of things we are relying on SAPS, for ballistics we are using the SAPS ballistics for weapons used by the police officer we take it to the same SAPS members who are working there.”
A limited budget and few resources are not a new challenge. Based on the findings of a study that was conducted by Montesh and Dintwe (2008), it was revealed that some of the challenges
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encountered by the ICD included lack of resources, lack of power to force institutions to comply and implement findings, limited policing power and a limited budget. Bruce (2006), Du Plessis an Louw (2005), and Berg (2013) all argue that limited resources result in a lower quality of investigation, a less thorough investigation, and a failure to adequately address issues that are far more prevalent than deaths in custody or as a result of police action (such as corruption and torture). Bruce (2006) and Berg (2013) state that under resourcing, lack of capacity and broader logistical challenges (for instance, travelling long distances to get to rural cases) mean that the oversight body cannot cope with its caseloads. P-Inv-49 emphasised the lack of a sound budget:
“Remember, the IPID is independent from the police, in this case the SAPS however, we are reporting to the one Minister of Police; we are all reporting to him, which means all our budgets are coming from the police. So, do you think if I’m investigating you, and you are the one responsible for giving me a budget and resources, that you would give me enough budget and resources to investigate you? We try by all means to work with the available budget. The budget is too small.”
The participants also indicated that there was a shortage of investigating officers responsible for investigating criminal offences:
“We are not adequately capacitated for anything that we are mandated to do. No, SAPS have, I don’t know how many hundred thousand employees. We have I think 250 to 300, this includes your chief directors, assisting directors, the management level who are not investigators. The work load is not equally distributed amongst them. That makes the entire IPID…so you can see the ratio. There is a serious shortage of manpower, resources, proper management, infrastructure, IT, funding and poor salaries. We laugh about it, but those are the serious challenges that we encounter.” (P-Inv-53).
P-Inv-49 explained that the limited budget had to do with the dependence of the IPID on the SAPS as they still reported to the same Minister of Police as the people who were suspects in their cases. This challenge corresponds with a point that was raised by Montesh and Dintwe, (2008) who stated that the police oversight body in South Africa was not independent. They argued that the current arrangement where the SAPS and the oversight body, which at that time was the ICD reported to the Minister of Safety and Security did not support its independence.
According Berg (2013:147), from 1997 to 2011 the budget increased eightfold and its staff almost tripled, yet it never attained a full contingent of staff despite these increases in personnel and resources. Hendricks and Musavengana (2010) state that the demand always seems to outweigh the capacity to deliver, particularly with the steady rise in cases received. The
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majority of the participants complained about the distance that they had to cover to investigate cases, highlighting the impact that it had on their jobs:
“The main challenge is that we investigate the whole of KZN. We have this office, Durban office and another one at eMpangeni, but the total number of investigators that we have here is less than twenty, for the whole province. We deal with plus or minus 184 police stations the whole of KZN. The geographical area of KZN is huge. I will leave here tomorrow to go to Newcastle; that is like four, five hours’ drive, and by the time you get there you are exhausted. When you get there, to a certain hotel, you sleep.
You wake up the following day, you start looking for the people (complainants) you made arrangements with, only to find that you can’t find them anymore. Like I said, they are now running away from you.”
P-Inv-47 illustrated the impact that long distances had on the cases that they had to gather evidence for:
“For us, we arrive when they have reported that there is a scene, we need to attend when someone has died by the hands of the police. Then from here due to jurisdiction, he has died KwaDukuza. By the time we reach there, it’s after two hours and the scene is already contaminated. You know they have interfered with the crime scene. We as IPID we are a reaction unit, we come after everything has been done. As an investigator you need to work hard to determine the evidence because let’s say they killed a person, and the person did not shoot back but by the time we reach the crime scene you will find that the police have put a gun in the person’s hand, saying he first shot at them and they reacted to that.”
Clearly, the distances that the KZN IPID investigating officers have to cover challenge the effectiveness of the oversight body and result in a large number of pending cases. The participants raised the concern that it was difficult for them to attend to all cases. Based on the IPID Annual Performance Plan (2017:13), the geographical location of the IPID offices poses a challenge for IPID investigating officers, because it becomes difficult to reach victims as they have to travel long distances to reach crime scenes. As a result, they end up using a huge proportion of the already stretched budget for travelling and accommodation expenses.
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5.8 IPID Organisational Strategies to Ensure Police Accountability