Police accused of misinterpreting protest data

The university’s research unit analysed 156 000 detailed incident reports in the police’s IRIS between 1992 and 2013. The unit said they obtained this information through the Promotion of Access to Information Act. The unit’s Prof. Peter Alexander said, “From our analysis, we have demonstrated that not all incidents classified as unrest are violent. We found that only 54 percent of protests sampled were violent.” He said the police’s loose definition of violent protest included incidents at police roadblocks and that this skewed the statistics.

Alexander said their findings challenged the lack of detailed information about police crowd incidents, and offered an analysis of incidents recorded by IRIS in pursuit of an effective, reliable and accurate system of recording incidents critical for public accountability.

Alexander’s colleague, Dr Carin Runciman said, “Incidents are not protests. Unrests are not the same as violence.”

Last year, Lieutenant Elias Mawela told parliament that incidents of violent protest had escalated from 1 226 in 2011/12 to 1 882 in 2012/13, and to 1 907 in 2013/14.

Alexander said National Police Commissioner Riah Phiyega was using these figures to justify an extra R3.3 billion a year on public order policing. He said this misrepresentation of numbers was central to justifying massive increased spending. “We are disturbed by the way IRIS statistics have been misrepresented,” said Alexander. “This has implications of criminalisation of protests for basic democratic rights. It impacts on the ability to hold our leaders accountable.”

In his response, police spokesperson, Lieutenant General Solomon Makgale said, “The police did not conflate incidents and protests. Any crowd management action is defined as an incident, which will either be peaceful or unrest. Incidents include all protest actions, peaceful gatherings and pure unrest incidents that cannot be justified as crowd management incidents.”