SAPS responds to UJ
AUCKLAND PARK – SAPS responds to UJ’s social change research unit.
The University of Johannesburg (UJ) social change research unit recently revealed that the 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 was 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 from 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.
However, SAPS commented and said the findings of the research are a deliberate and distorted interpretation of the submission to the Portfolio Committee on Police.
“It is clear that this deliberate misinterpretation of facts supports the view held by some of the researchers that the police should not be involved in the management of protests. The information was clearly manipulated in order to suit this view,” said Lieutenant General Solomon Makgale.
“The SAPS therefore did not conflate incidents and protests. Any crowd management action is defined as an incident, which will either be peaceful or termed as unrest. In other words incidents include all protest actions, peaceful gatherings and pure unrest incidents that cannot be justified as crowd management incidents like taxi violence, gang violence, ethnic and racial violence, demonstrations, political meetings, road barricades and revenge attacks by a small group of people,” Mokgale said.
The research report is under the auspices of the South African Research Chair Initiative (SARChI) in Social Change at UJ.
