Cops suspected of fiddling are now inspectors

Ten of 11 high-ranking officers accused of rigging crime statistics in KwaZulu-Natal are now allegedly part of an inspectorate team.

Police sources said Pietermaritzburg's Mountain Rise officers, who had been transferred last week to work with the former acting provincial commissioner pending the outcome of an investigation, were now inspecting stations in the city and in Durban. The provincial inspectorate is a component of the national inspectorate, previously called the evaluation services division.

The inspectorate is responsible for operational and organisational evaluations and inspections of police stations and specialist units within the province. It has unrestricted access to dockets and other aspects of police stations.

Members of the unit are there to ensure that rules and regulations are followed and are required to report any suspicion of misconduct or irregularities.

A police source questioned how the officers could be part of this team. "How can they be checking important police documents when they have been implicated with interfering with dockets?" said the source, who added that this could be viewed as a promotion.

The source also said the move could be seen as suggesting the officers were being protected.

Johan Burger of the Institute for Security Studies said that if this was true, it made "an absolute mockery of the system of oversight that the inspectorate is supposed to provide".

"Either those who appointed them to the positions were unaware of the allegations against them, or are absolutely irresponsible in terms of their use of the inspectorate," he said.

He added that the newly appointed provincial commissioner, Mamunye Ngobeni, should immediately intervene.

Ngobeni declined to comment on the issue, referring questions to her spokeswoman Phindile Radebe.

Radebe denied the officers were tasked with inspecting other stations, saying they were not assigned to any specific task or team. She said they were now working under Assistant Commissioner Pat Brown, the head of detectives in KZN.

"They are tasked to deal with any matter raised at any station in the province... to put it simply, they have no specific task," she said, adding she could not cite examples of what these tasks were.

The Star