UJ slams police for lying to receive billions of rands
AUCKLAND PARK – UJ study claims SAPS manipulated civil unrest figures to gain an extra R3.3-billion a year.
The University of Johannesburg (UJ)’s social change research unit says South African Police Service (SAPS) officials and government ministers misconstrued the Incident Registration Information System (IRIS) data, and in consequence misled Parliament and the public.
This is based on their recent study which analysed 156 000 detailed incident reports between 1992 and 2013. The unit claims SAPS officials manipulated civil unrest figures in the country to justify an extra R3.3 billion per year for public order policing.
This premise is of the South African Police Service Data on Crowd Incidents: A Preliminary Analysis Report, which was launched by Professor Peter Alexander during a media engagement at the University of Johannesburg’s (UJ) Research Village, in the Auckland Park Bunting Road (APB) campus, on 27 May.
Prof Alexander and his team obtained this information through the Promotion of Access to Information Act.
The research report is under the auspices of the South African Research Chair Initiative (SARChI) in Social Change at UJ.
At the media briefing, Prof Alexander senior professor of sociology at UJ, introduced the report and drew out the critical implications of the research.
He said their research found that not all incidents classified as unrest are violent, and only 54 per cent of protests sampled were violent.
“We are disturbed by the way IRIS statistics have been misrepresented. This has implications of criminalisation of protests for basic democratic rights, and for the direction of resources away from the poor. It impacts on the ability to hold our leaders accountable,” said Prof Alexander.
The main focus of the report has been to understand incidents, not protests, recorded as either ‘crowd (peaceful)’ or ‘crowd (unrest)’.
The research further challenges the lack of detailed information about police crowd incidents, and offers an analysis of incidents recorded by IRIS in pursuit of an effective, reliable and accurate system of recording incidents critical for public accountability.
“Incidents are not protests. Unrests are not the same as violence,” said Dr Carin Runciman, one of the co-authors and a post-doctoral research fellow at the university.
Police Commissioner Riah Phiyega’s office is yet to comment on the matter.
