corruption and the south african police

Crime, Law & Social Change30: 89–106, 1998.© 1998Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

89

Corruption and the South African Police

MIKE BROGDEN & PREET NIJHARInstitute of Criminology, Queens University of Belfast, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK

Abstract. The literature on corruption in countries in the course of transition is likely toescalate in the light of changes in Eastern Europe (Holmes 1997, Varese 1997). The ‘end ofempire’ is associated with the breakdown in the rule of law. Through a variety of subterfuges,both individuals and corporate bodies seek to ensure their own survival, within the matrixof the collapse of legal order. In South Africa, similar transformations, as epitomised by thehearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, have provided a window of opportunityto unveil the mechanisms which maintained that apartheid regime for nearly half a century.Understanding that complex practice of state deviance entails recognising the different levelsof state power and malpractice in that country. This article flows directly from the Foucauldiannotion of the decentralisation of power in modern society. Power in the authoritarian stateis not just a function of a clearly-defined state apparatus. Rather that locus co-exists withvarious sub-foci at lower levels of state and civil society, in which local interactions and powerrelations, contribute to the totality of control. Apartheid survived for many years not because itsignified an authoritarian centralised state but because it could rely on individuals and agenciesat lower strata of power to contribute their own efforts to sustaining that abnormal structure.Deviance by state personnel at different levels – to which the Nelson’s eye was turned – wascritical to the maintenance of white hegemony. The article focuses directly on one such nexus– the extent to which different interests – financial, organisational, and a commitment to racialhegemony – cooperated in a seamless web to ensure that the white rule was paramount inmicro-level decision-making structures. Micro-level influences on police training and of policepromotions – deviant by any conventional yardstick-served both state and individual interests.

Introduction

Peculiarly, one critical feature of the rule and demise of the apartheid regimein South Africa, as Abel (1997) has pointed out, was its formal adherence tothe rule of law. While this legal stance can be perceived on one hand simplyas an expedient to disguise the blatant inequity under the regime, it can con-versely, as Abel has argued, be construed as a commitment to the notion ofthe ‘normality’ of the South African state. Legal observance implied potentiallegitimacy within the international body of nation-states.

The state could only ensure victories on the legal terrain as long as itoperated with a permissive legal structure which allowed the state to winwithin the rules. Deviance allowed by the rules was not a contradiction buta necessary precondition of state power. For the most part, many of the evils

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90 MIKE BROGDEN & PREET NIJHAR

practised by the South African state agencies and security forces were per-mitted by law. For example, when a private security guard in East Londonwas discovered to have killed approximately 106 ‘attempted shop-breakers’over a period of years, the vast majority of those killings, were deemed to belegal under a peculiar South African law that allowed suspects to be shot ifthey tried to avoid arrest (Brogden & Shearing 1993). Deviance within therule of law avoided problematising the state.

Conversely, when law-breaking was clear-cut – even if it served state pur-poses – it would be disavowed by the state. Thus in the Muldergate affair(Rees 1980) in which South African government personnel misused statefunds in an attempt to subvert sections of the western press ‘heads rolled’on its revelation. Less well-known is the suspension of the Head of the SouthAfrican Prison Service in 1992 for allegedly engaging in a deal with a ma-jor food supplier to avoid including necessary vitamins in the diet of blackprisoners.

This concern with the rule of law, of course, does not mean that SouthAfrican legislation, criminal and civil, met international standards of hu-man rights. It simply ensured that most deviant activities by individuals andorganisations on behalf of the South African state (especially where thosenormative infractions coincided with personal gains), were for the most partcovered by legal norms, norms which enabled large scale deviance to occurwithin the law (Lee 1981).

The permissiveness of legal and procedural rules

Critical to understanding this generalised state deviance – from the activitiesof the ‘hit squads’ to the massacres of Sebokeng and the Ciskei by the se-curity forces – are two theses which draw upon sociological structuralism.The first is that such deviance wassystemicin character rather thanaber-rational. Analysis within critical legal studies over the last two decades (incommon law countries) has emphasised that the legal rules are often writtenin such a way as to permit rather than to disallow state deviance (seeinteralia McBarnet 1981, Erickson 1982, McConville 1991). Deviance from legalnotions of equity are often permitted, not proscribed, by the formal rules.For example, in law enforcement, the conception of ‘reasonable suspicion’,a legal maxim, in effect conceals that the determination of reasonableness isbased on the prejudices and stereotypical assumptions of the police subcul-ture. Black-letter law (law -in-the-books), postulated as impartial and precise,often contains within it a discourse that allows the dominant party to ensurepresumptions against the suspect. Law, far from prohibiting deviance by the

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CORRUPTION AND THE SOUTH AFRICAN POLICE 91

state and its agents, in its apparent impartiality, actually provides for it tooccur.

Secondly, in the corpus of work on the police sub-culture, orthodox per-ceptions have portrayed that culture as hindering the achievemental goals ofthe police organisation (Reiner 1995). Police racism and violence were tra-ditionally portrayed as representing an unwanted aberration from the policemanagerial rules, quirks that should be dealt with by appropriate sanctionsto ensure that law enforcement was impartial in practice. Conversely, therevisionist position (Brogden & Shearing 1993) has documented how thepolice subculture is only superficially deviant. Its justificatory discourse andpractices furnish deviant devices to achieve organisational goals that cannotnormally be achieved by non-deviant means. Subculture complements ratherthan contradicts organisation culture.

In this context, legal and procedural deviance combined with the manifes-tation of the police sub-culture to achieve the objectives of both state and ofindividuals.

The conjunction of personal rewards with state goals

The promotions system of the late South African Police illustrates how eco-nomic imperatives to obtain benefits from the control of the police promotionsystem served to ensure white racial dominance within the South African Po-lice. It shows how apparent deviance by lower ranking police and educationalpersonnel, for their own individual profit, actually coincided with the largerinterests of racial hegemony. It demonstrates that corruption and sub-culturaldeviance by police personnel did not represent an aberration from the formalobjectives of promotions policy but in practice meshed directly with statepolicy. Macro-level malpractices of the South African Police were sustainedat the micro-level through apparent equity of treatment of police promo-tional aspirants, a system which simply served to reinforce existing inequities.Within that practice, personal enrichment was a motivating factor. In an ear-lier reference to corruption within the Polish state, Los (1982) claimed that‘...mutual corruption (occurs) within the network of ruling cliques formed bythe occupants of the key oppositions in the Communist party, state admin-istration, and the police. These officials organise their mutual relationshipsin such a way that each member of the clique has an opportunity to takeadvantage of the public resources controlled by the other members. Theircorruption consists mainly of the totally unhampered private use of publicresources.’

This picture can readily be transposed to South Africa at the time of thefall of apartheid, with the addition that the coincidence of state interests and

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self-interests, evident at the seat of government in Pretoria, was also appar-ent at lower levels such as the following microcosm. Methodologically, thisarticle is based on the overt and covert process of a formal request by theCouncil of the institute of higher education.1 in Johannesburg that was themonopoly supplier of junior police education in South Africa (and known inthis article by the pseudonym Poltek) to conduct an enquiry into the futureof police training which was threatened by the election of a new non-racialgovernment in 1994. The means included content analysis of official mate-rial; questionnaires and interviews with the training and managerial staff ofthe Police Programme (the Programme Area represented the largest singletertiary educational process in Southern Africa); interviews with samples offormer students and course Moderators (External Examiners); and necessarycovert practices.2

The South African Police (SAP)

The importance of the SAP to the maintenance of apartheid regime, needslittle documentation. It was notorious – inter-alia – for massacres of unarmedcivilians3 and the yearly average of some 250 deaths in custody. In compo-sition, the 120,000 strong SAP mirrored the larger racial structures of statepower. At the apex of the organisational pyramid were some 52 Generals, allbut three of whom were white (predominantly Afrikaners). At the other endof the scale, the rank-and-file were mainly black (Brogden & Shearing 1993).

Critically, progression through the ranks (vital because of the meagersalaries for constables) wasonlyvia the acquisition of distance-learning qual-ifications from the monopoly provider, Poltek. Each officer, irrespective ofracial classification, had to undertake that apparently equitable, meritocratic,path. Poltek procedures determined progress at the junior level while its se-nior sister institution, the University of South Africa (UNISA) conferred aB.A. Police Studies for the senior aspirants. Nearly half of Poltek’s educa-tional provision was directed to one particular sector of South African society,the SAP. The latter was the crucial source of finance and staffing – for Poltek’spolice programme.

The nature of the enquiry

Two specific factors influenced the direction of the Enquiry and the parame-ters framing its approach. These were the SAP Report on (Poltek) Police Edu-cation (the Van der Westhuizen Report), and secondly, data on the substantialfailure rate of students in the Policing Programme. The Van der Westhuizen

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Report was commissioned in 1992 by the SAP to ‘ascertain whether the pro-cedures, methods and techniques, which are employed in the administeringof the National Diploma in Police Administration are efficient and effective’.This concern with effectiveness represents the central thread running throughall aspects of the subsequent analysis. The Report team considered principallythe content of Poltek courses, on the mode of delivery and assessment, and therole of the SAP Training Officers. In all these matters, it documented majorfailures – including racist abuse on student scripts by markers and allegedcorruption over examination papers. Its central conclusion was driven by afinancial imperative, not one of inequity:

‘South Africa can no longer afford the luxury of processing thousandsand thousands of police officers annually at great cost to the taxpayer with-out achieving the performance-specific results and strategic career-planningobjectives’ (p.99).

Amongst the recommendations, it called for the end of Poltek’s monopolyof police education from January 1994 and the involvement of other ter-tiary institutions in that process, for more relevant course content, and moreinnovative, experiential pedagogy.

However, independently of this analysis and recommendations, the his-tory of the production and presentation of the Van Der Westhuizen Report issignificant in the way the SAP hierarchy and the ex-SAP officers in Poltek,colluded to conceal it. The report was presented by General Fyvas’s Ef-ficiency Services Department (largely staffed by ex-Security personnel) toPoltek in January 1994, prior to being passed to the Commissioner of theSAP. On receipt by the Poltek Director, it was passed to the Head of the PoliceProgramme, Mr Koblus Planck (a former SAP Captain).4 Given the gravityof the above analysis and recommendations, it was critical for a detailed re-sponse to be provided. The Report was effectively ‘buried’ by Planck with thealleged connivance of General Fyvas, as well as by the circle of SAP Majorswho acted as course Moderators. The author of the subsequent enquiry wasonly informed of the Report’s existence by two SAP officers (former Secu-rity Police who had joined the ANC). Through their contacts with GeneralFyvas’s staff, the only surviving copy of the Report was smuggled out of theGeneral’s office for photocopying.5

The Westhuizen Report had documented publicly for the first time failingsand implicit corruption in the Police Programme, knowledge long familiar tostaff, to police students, and to supervisory officers in the SAP but aboutwhich no action had been taken. This reflected a major cover-up in the higherranks of the SAP and especially at the managerial levels in Poltek in the in-terest of maintaining white advantages in promotion and in financial benefits.

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A network of serving SAP and former SAP at Poltek had guaranteed a policyof ‘no change’.

The election of the new Government in May 1994 had several major im-plications for Poltek. That election committed the public services of the newSouth Africa to a process of affirmative action in order to redress the stark im-balances. Poltek was faced with several problems. It had a public reputationas an educational mainstay of the old regime. As (together with UNISA), thecentral provider of distance learning education in Southern Africa, its prac-tices were relatively open. Public accountability was increasing – because ineffect, Poltek practices determined the shape and quality of law enforcementin South Africa. Poltek’s major concern was that the new government wouldcurtail its economic lifeline, the multi-million pound monopoly of junior po-lice education, with all public sector tertiary institutions being allowed tocompete subject to the approval of a new National Police Training Board.The enquiry was instituted as a basis for preserving that monopoly.

Organisational structure

The Police Programme constituted an autonomous pyramid within Poltek. AVice Rector was given primary responsibility for monitoring the Programme.Beneath him was the Programme Director who conducted all functions withregard to some forty staff. The Director appointed and promoted largely with-out reference to the Human Resources Division and staff specialists of theinstitution. There was no recourse to an external check on the suitability ofcandidates. He appointed the Subject Head, whose own position inevitablyowed fealty to the Director.

Secondly, this autonomy of the Director as manager of personnel wascompounded by his effective autonomy over the annual budget for the Pro-gramme. Nominal higher authority lay with the Vice Rector, a function rarelyused critically. The budget for the Programme had evidentially rarely beenscrutinised for cost effectiveness by that functionary. Given the size of theoperating budget – over £4 million – the scope for autonomous dispensationover funding activities was extraordinary. Thirdly, the Director was the acad-emic head, despite only possessing qualifications from Poltek and in ‘PoliceScience’. The consequence was that one area of assumed expertise qualifiedhim for the others. The Director was not required to have teaching experienceper se, nor have an effective grasp of the specific, oral, written, and technolog-ical means of pedagogy essential to distance education, despite his positionas the head of the largest educational programme in Southern Africa.

The simplicity of the organisational structure of the Policing Programmemirrored – not surprisingly – that of the traditional structure of the SAP.

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Movement of personnel from one to another was accommodated by familiar-ity of the organisational signposts of a mechanistic organisation. The sourceof problems with the Policing Programmes was identical with the twin in-terests served by the Policing Programme. It served immediate, personal,economic interests. But, critically, in its control over promotions in the SAP,it made a major contribution to the sustenance of a violent racist police in-stitution. The very nature of that permissive structure allowed practices tobe exploited and utilised by personnel who possessed interests, goals, andperceptions that differed markedly from those of an educational institution inthe midst of rapid social change.

Student failure rate on the policing programme

Course failure through the application of practices of inequality within a for-mally equal system was the major feature of Poltek’s policing provisions.With the exception of the specific language courses, taking the academicyear 1993 as typical, of those students who enrolled for policing programmecourses, only a quarter achieved a pass in that year. It was normal to fail forpolice personnel (especially ‘non-white’ officers).

The statistics of pass failure for the 1993 academic year demonstrateddramatically course ineffectiveness. Of a total of 125,874 enrolments for in-dividual courses in the academic year 1993 34,284 students passed the finalexamination. Excluding language subjects, the average pass rate per coursewas 31%. The overall rate was biased by the inclusion of subjects such asBureau-Administration which had a relatively high pass rate (51%) but onlya very small number of students. A more realistic appraisal of the pass/failrate in the policing programme depended on total student enrolment figuresindependently of course. Thus in 1993, of some 120,000 enrolments for indi-vidual courses (again excluding the language courses) only 25.5% of students(30,301) passed in the individual subjects. A police student, enrolling for anon-language Poltek SA course in 1993, had only a 1 in 4 chance of passingthat course.

Such failure would be repeated annually because Poltek remained the onlyway of climbing the internal promotion ladder. Poltek benefited directly fromthis failure rate as the monopoly, non-accountable, provider. Students hadno alternative but to repeat courses. Statistically, it was the majority blackstudents who failed while, by contrast, white students were consequentlypromoted in the SAP. These results were also obfuscated in the presentationaldiscourse. Students could fall at several different hurdles within the assess-ment process, registering but failing to complete assignments; insufficientlyhigh marks in the assignment to sit the final examination; and failures in the

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‘unseen’ examination. Only the final student demise was tabulated. The pre-sentation consequently inflated the real success rate. Failures due to structuraldiscrimination in completing the course for black students, to lack of mate-rials, alienation from the course languages, and the exigencies of townshipduties were concealed.

The failure rate had two financial implications for students. The typicalblack student would fail the course several times, on each occasion, payingfor the course (some £320 per annum – a major investment for under-paidconstables) out of his/her own pocket (only ‘successful’ students were re-embursed). Conversely, the typical, white, student – given the variety of ad-vantages within the system – would pass first time and suffer no financialpenalties. In addition of course, subsequent promotion for the white studentwould bring its own financial benefits.

Course content

Failure for black students was a function of structural disadvantage and ex-aminer prejudices, explicit and implicit. It also related to the discourse ofthe material presented in the Study Guides. This discourse was epitomisedby one particular course Study Guide, that of Ethnology. In the topsy-turvyworld of South Africa, that course intentionally taught police officers racism.It contained a long-discredited ‘white’ history of South Africa. It emphasisedthe peculiar ‘natural’ evolved characteristics of different races, concludingwith the occupation for which different races were naturally suited: ‘Indiansmake good waiters’ (p.55) Curiously, the course was compulsory only for ‘so-called coloured’ officers who were presumed to lack the cultural traditionsand implicit inherited stability apparent in the other racial groups.

The course prose and its pedagogic style was educationally archaic. TheProgramme was divided between specifically policing courses (learn the po-lice rules and procedures by rote) and legal courses (learn the legal rulesand procedures by rote). The Study Guides for the policing modules wereuncritical, contained no rationale, objectives nor aims, no relation to practice,nor any element of progression. Most of the Law courses – which had anexceptionally low pass rate – simply listed de-contextualised criminal leg-islation and procedures. The Police Administration courses epitomised theworse production of the Policing Programme, consisting of a list of the Rulesand Regulations of the SAP, and sections from the Police Acts – mirror-ing the traditional military rule-bound character of the SAP. Conversely, anew Community Policing Programme presented a reverse problem replicatingAmerican textbooks on community policing, with no relevance to grassrootsexperience of police officers on the ground in South Africa.6

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Poltek also differed from many conventional tertiary institutions with re-gard to the external authorship of its course. Thus, in one extreme case,Investigation of Crime, the course introduction credited some thirty differ-ent authors.7 Material was inserted into that course without any concern forrelevance or context. The use of external authors for Study Guides were pro-duced for a fee by mainly SAP officers, often independently of academicqualification in the subject.

Course staffing – the financial imperative

Staffing of the courses was peculiar in terms of qualifications, promotion,and the relationship to the SAP. It would appear to be driven more by adesire to maximise the financial benefit to SAP contracts than by any con-cern for educational standards. Poltek depended not just upon its 32 full-timeprogramme staff for the delivery and assessment of the courses, but utilisedpart-time script markers (for students, script markers were the primary sourceof feedback and commentary upon their work) and thirty external Modera-tors. The criterion for such appointments seemed to be financial rather thaneducational. The front line of the Police Programme in relation to distantstudents was represented by the Training Officers of the SAP, who had theirown pecuniary and career interests.

Staff Curriculum Vitae were unusual. Seven staff possessed only Poltek’sDiploma– the course that they were actually teaching. Only one member ofstaff possessed a qualification at Master’s level, and only one further staffmember had prior tertiary experience. Just five members of staff possessedactual teaching qualifications. In two cases, it appeared that staff had claimedimportant qualifications that they did not actually possess.8

Fourteen of the staff had come directly from the SAP with twelve othersfrom a legal background. The predominant qualification of ex-SAP graduateofficers held the BA Police Science from UNISA, a course that even in the eraof the new ANC government still contained Study Guide material regardingthe ‘Moscow-directed ANC terrorists’. Policing pedigrees were dispropor-tionately represented in the Programme hierarchy. The mean occupationalservice for the law staff was 3.3 years but for those with a police backgroundthe mean service was 13.6. While the latter figure was partially distortedby the presence amongst the police staff of two lecturers pensioned fromthe SAP, there remained a dramatic difference in occupational experience.In practice, the dominant ambience in the Programme was that of old-styleSAP policing. Nearly all senior positions (including the Director of the Pro-gramme) were filled by former SAP officers. It was evident that traditionsand practices in the Programme reflected SAP cultural traits in authoritative

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managerial style and in direct and indirect racism.9 Appointment practices tothe full-time staff followed this pattern of SAP relationships. Despite formalinstructions to the contrary, the Head advertised new posts only in Afrikaansnews medium, not read by the vast majority of potential applicants.

One apparent justification of the lack of serious academic qualificationsof several staff was their ‘experience in the field’ – that is, as white officerswithin the old SAP and thus immersed in the authoritarian and racist practicesof the SAP orthodoxy. Given that that experience had been acquired througha process of job reservations (affirmative action in a different direction), itwas difficult to see that experience as having any relevance to the predom-inantly black SAP student market with their long history of discrimination.Some fourteen part-time staff were engaged as tutors and lecturers within thePolicing Programme, through a network of (mainly) SAP relationships, andoften from unqualified SAP retirees. Several such tutor appointees were lateraccredited as lecturers at a significantly increased salary without any apparentexternal approval.

Script marking as currency

A critical part of the problem with the Police Programme related to the formand practice of assessment. This was a pivotal cause for concern in severalways. It determined the future careers of the students. It was the major areaof discretionary funding within Poltek and of part-time employment.

The Police Programme employed some 220 part-time assignment and ex-amination markers. Together they consumed, according to the 1993 figures,one million pounds sterling a year. In the optimum situation, these script-markers, together with the internal full-time staff, marked some 600,000scripts a year (although in practice the number was likely to be two thirdof that total).

There was no requirement in the Police Programme that these appoint-ments be subject to the approval of higher managerial authorities. Indeed, incertain cases, such as in the Ethnology course, a tutor with only the NationalDiploma as a qualification could appoint both script markers and Modera-tor (a self perpetuation of ‘scientifistic’ racism). During the year, both theSubject Head and the course Moderator would be expected to overview asample of scripts from each marker. These twenty-five script markers togetherwith the four internal staff, were to be responsible for a potential 32,400assignments as well as for the examination of the 8,100 students. In otherwords, the potential expenditure for the one year Community Policing coursefor script-marking alone, given a Marker received £3 for each script, wouldequal some £100,000. Over the planned three year programme of the Com-

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munity Policing – assuming a fifty per cent diminution in students in eachof the succeeding years – then by the end of the academic year 1996 theoptimum sum for script-marking for the Community Policing courses wouldbe nearly £200,000. The Subject Head solely responsible for determining thepayment of this sum was a former SAP Major, and payment would be madeindependently of any other form of managerial accounting.

Because of three factors – the notorious rate of student attrition in thePolice Programme courses, the formal requirement that only three of theactual assignments would be taken into account in compiling the final mark,and the unique factor of the National Election (because of extra police stud-ies, students would only be required during that year to undertake minimumassignments) – the real number of assignments for the year studied for theinquiry would be approximately half the optimum figure (some sixteen thou-sand assignments) averaging just over six hundred assignments each (againindependently of examination marking). Each marker would deal with justover six hundred assignments – some £2000 in value.10

In practice however, there were no formal controls over the maximumnumber of scripts which part-time marker could undertake. Thus a scriptmarker who was retired might receive an allocation of one hundred scriptson the Monday, and then reappear with the scripts duly marked on the Friday,to collect a further sixty scripts to mark over the weekend. One of the unqual-ified SAP pensioners marked some 2137 scripts in the 1993 academic year,effectively a full-time post.11 Script marking was in effect an effective way ofboosting the pensions of SAP retirees. Despite a proliferation of under-paidand unemployed teaching staff in South Africa, many well-equipped for suchwork, the unwritten rule was only to employ SAP-related personnel.

The Criminal Evidence and Procedures III course provided the worse casescenario. Four script markers – apart from the subject tutor – were employedto deal with the scripts of some 1900 students, each of whom was requiredto submit at least three assignments. Some twelve hundred students would sitthe examination in this subject. Thus on average, a marker would deal withsome one thousand scripts and some two hundred and fifty examination pa-pers. Most script markers dealt with an annual total of some 800–900 scripts.But there were extreme variations. Thus one full-time SAP Officer markedsome 2620 scripts that year.12 Given that most script marking occurs withina concentrated 5–6 months in the calendar year, he apparently scrutinisedan average of 100 scripts per week during that period. Assuming that anadequate script marking involved approximately half an hour of work, themarker spent some fifty hours a week for nearly six months dealing withthe scripts. Scripts were paper currency to the value of R16-R18 each (some£8,000 for the academic year). Together with examination marking, he would

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have earned from his ‘part-time’ occupation, an income equivalent to that ofhis salary from the SAP.

The assessment procedure resembled an industrial conveyor belt, provid-ing major financial returns without reference to the quality of feedback tothe student. The speed of the conveyor belt appeared to be in direct relationto the financial imperative of the network of SAP pensioners. The numberof finished products – marked scripts – was determined by economic ratherthan educational incentives. The faster a script marker worked, the greater thefinancial return – and the higher the student failure rate (especially given theneed for future re-sits). To the outsider, these part-time courses, given theirpoor quality, were grossly over-examined. Linking together two factors – theover-assessment of students and the economic determination of productivity–, there was a direct economic incentive for increasing for maintaining thelevel of student failure on these part-time courses. The more assessment re-quirements, the greater the financial windfall for subject tutor and for scriptmarkers.

External controls

In tertiary education, the role of the External Examiner (Moderator) is criticalin the maintenance of standards. Conventions on such appointments werenormally flouted. Formally the Moderator is expected to check on the aca-demic credibility of the teaching staff, and to ensure – by sampling scriptsand script-marking – that standards are adequate throughout the course.

Appointment of Moderators on the Police Programme was subject to thepeculiarity of Poltek’s relationship with ‘industry’ – in all but two cases, theModerators were SAP officers. In several instances, they possessed no formalqualification in the subject. Moderators were normally appointed through anSAP-networking process, an in-house system, with no reference to a widerstandards body. If the head of the Police Programme wanted a particularindividual to act as a Moderator (the examples were common), there couldbe no sustainable opposition to his decision to appoint a white retired servingSAP officers, independently of qualifications and of relevant experience.

Formally, the Moderator was appointed for twelve months. In practice,there was no record of a Moderator being removed at the end of the acad-emic year. Most Moderators had been in post between four and seven years.Furthermore, nearly all the Moderators were serving SAP officers. Their ap-proach to the course reflected the cultural biases of the SAP about the qualityand character of requisite knowledge.

There was no recorded criticism by them of the Study Guides. Coursematerial was ossified because most Moderators seemed to have accepted that

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what was deemed correct for themselves as students many years earlier, wasstill correct for the current generation of students. The lack of experience bythe Moderators of civilian educational institutions ensured that they had littleknowledge of academic standards. In a minority of cases, the Moderator hadactually written the Study Guides, as well as Script-marking and externallyexamining the same material. In practice, the relationship between the Moder-ators, the Director of the Police Programme, and certain of the script markers,ensured that the content and examination of the courses, while comments ofstudents as individuals or by the Van der Westhuizen Report were brushedaside. Thus, despite Poltek being committed to a partnership system with therelevant ‘industry’ with regard to producing appropriately qualified personneland the course formally governed by a Standing Committee, consisting ofmiddle-ranking personnel from the SAP and senior staff from Poltek, thatbody simply rubber-stamped decisions made in more informal contexts, withrare serious debate and had no record of taking initiatives. Several of the keySAP members of the Committee were Moderators, Study Guide authors, andscript markers of long-standing.

Ancillary activities

The teaching programme in policing drew upon a range of supportive activi-ties and agencies, in delivery and assessment. Staff were required to undertakeseveral Contact Sessions with students across South Africa. They were alsorequired to interact at a formal conference twice a year with the SAP TrainingOfficers who provided the front-line contact with students. In addition, therewere more ritualistic activities such as attendance at student graduations.

In the 1993 academic year, some 6,000 students attended these ContactSessions across South Africa, approximately 17% of the total student popu-lation. Ten per cent of subject tutor time was involved in this process, withan overall cost of £125,000. This was the equivalent of £20 per student whoattended the sessions (approximately a quarter of the fee paid by the studentfor each course). The vast majority of students (over 80%) did not attend.Such benefits as there were from the class contact, were consequently reapedonly by a small minority.

Contact with students on the ground was monitored by local SAP TrainingOfficers. The Van der Westhuizen Report had estimated that the annual coststo the SAP of providing this service was some £1.2 million and proposedthat a subsidy to Poltek be withdrawn immediately. It was especially scathingof the competence of the Training Officers to conduct tutor functions. Fewof them possessed higher qualifications than the National Diploma, and aproportion being actually students on the course for which they were acting

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as tutors. Partly in recognition of this problem, the Police Programme heldsix-monthly conferences (of three days duration) with the Training Officers.The evidence of these conferences was that they were essentially ritualisticgatherings for senior Poltek staff with the underlying function of providinga social gathering between Poltek management staff and ex-SAP tutors withtheir former colleagues. The costing of the exercise in the 1994 budget seemsremarkable because of its understatement – some £12,000 for staff travel (onesuch conference being held at the expensive leisure resort of the prestigiousClub Mykonos in the Western Cape). These costs were further increased bythe loss of staff from their full-time employment at Poltek – some £20,000 interms of one conference. Local graduations were similarly largely jamborees.For example, the Director of the Police Programme, together with the ViceRector (who had no current role in the Programme), and ten staff attendedthe graduation of fifty students at a Stellenbosch ceremony, an expeditionthat involved the equivalent loss of nearly thirty staff working days togetherwith some £10,000 in direct expenditure on travel and accommodation.

Racism and the SAP

Inevitably, racism was a consistent theme running throughout the programmeof Poltek’s contribution to the SAP. This central problematic at the macrolevel of South African society was mirrored at the micro-level in the courseprovision. Racism within the Policing Programme had critical educationaldysfunctions. In effect, it ensured that police officers who proceeded throughthe courses of the Policing Programme were not given the educational aware-ness to act correctly and effectively within the diverse South African commu-nities with whom they come into contact. This racism operated at two distinctlevels through course content and through more institutional channels.

Racism in course content was most evident in the directly and intentionallyracist Ethnology course.13 Even in the post-apartheid era, that course had notbeen censured until the direct intervention of the enquiry team. But the ques-tion of racism at the institutional levels was more subtle, and more complexin its resolution. Institutional racism had three dimensions – in staffing, inexpectations of students, and in the linguistic structure of the courses. Thestaffing problem was most evident. The Van der Westhuizen Report had pro-vided limited examples of racist abuse by script markers in commentaries onscripts. Apart from two members of the Porgramme staff (recent appointees),all lecturers and full-time tutors were white and predominantly Afrikaner inorigin. The course Moderators had a similar complexion as did the vast ma-jority of script markers. Some four-fifths of students were black. The disparitywas clear-cut.

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This problem has particular manifestations with regard to the expectationsof students. In the vast majority of cases, students appeared to be treatedequally, irrespective of race and gender. Assessments were marked and ex-aminations scripts read, often independently of any racist or gender-boundconnotations. But it was this very ‘fairness’ that represented the key structuralproblem. From a reading of a number of black student assignments in thefirst year courses of the Certificate Programme, there were critical problemsregarding learning techniques. In many cases, such students had not beentaught how to ‘learn’. Many black students, independently of possession of aMatriculation Certification, had undergone a qualitatively inferior educationto that of white students. Consequently, equal marking of scripts of black andwhite students means that, independently of innate ability, proportionatelymany more white students were likely to pass the courses than were blackstudents. Educational inequality in commencing the Poltek course resultedin the reaffirmation of structural and personal disadvantage for black stu-dents. Black students and white students were tested equally – but in a highlyunequal system.

Course failure had a major consequence for student careers in the SAP andthe subsequent stratification of the SAP in terms of vertical racial divisions.Students required to pass the Poltek courses in order to be promoted. Initialracial disadvantage due to inferior and intentionally discriminatory, primaryand secondary educational experience contributed to a police organisation inwhich white students were promoted faster and dominated the higher ranks,independently of any historical direct discriminatory practices.

This situation was compounded by the choice of English and Afrikaans asthe mediums of instruction. New staff (academic, administrative, and librar-ian) from non-Afrikaans backgrounds were rapidly if subtly taught that themedium of official discourse was Afrikaans, with black languages especiallybeing regarded as aberrant discourses. Given that the majority of lecturerswere from Afrikaans-speaking (and in one key case, barely literate in Eng-lish) backgrounds, black students were faced with a major linguistic hurdle.For many, Afrikaans was a third language. Conversely, for a student froman Afrikaans or English background, there was no such linguistic problem.Finally, the density of legal syntax of particular courses hardly assisted astudent for whom basic English or Afrikaans had only recently been acquired.

The Programme courses served to reinforce racial stratification in the SAP.With courses and assessment structures formally designed to treat studentsequally, the Policing Programme merely served to reinforce policing racialdivisions and consequently, to ensure that the policing requirement of SouthAfrican communities was normally determined by superior officers promoted

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by unequal educational opportunities, not due to particular qualities of talentand competence.

Critical was the position of the South African Police. The SAP had sev-eral major constraining powers over Poltek’s course. As major paymaster, itdetermined financially the content. Through its personnel, in Training, on theStanding Committee, as Moderators, as Script Markers, and often as StudyGuide Authors, it directly influenced form, content, and mode of assesment ofcourse. Historically, Poltek simply buttressed the received wisdom of the pay-master. Partly, through the dominant recruitment of SAP officers – whetherthrough transfer or secondment – and partly through the existence of Poltek’spersonnel who attached themselves to the SA’s milieu, it became little morethan an extension of the SAP’s role of defending the state against peoplerather than the people against the state.

Overview

This article has served three central functions. It has sought to show howa morally corrupt regime was sustained not merely by its centralised stateapparatus but through a variety of interstices of power at lower levels. Prac-tices in Poltek ensured the continuity of a policing structure that maintainedthe security of the apartheid regime. Secondly, it has been concerned withthe thesis that much deviance and corruption occurswithin the rules. Thepractices of Poltek policing staff and of the associated SAP officers, malignand financially self-interested in character, were contained within permissiverules and procedures. Little of what occurred in the Policing Programme re-lated to rule-breaking. Apartheid survived for nearly half a century becausein its very commitment to the rule of law, it ensured that relevant legislationand procedures were so tolerant as to allow and to encourage deviance onbehalf of the state as well as serving the immediate interests of its person-nel. Thirdly, it has demonstrated that the apparently aberrant practices of theSAP sub-culture actually contributed to the systemic goals of the policingorganisations. As such, the paper provides a critique of those orthodox sub-cultural accounts that presume an organisationally deviant character for thatsub-culture.

Notes

1. The institution has now changed its formal title and would rightly deny that the practicesdocumented in this article, still continue. There is no doubt that its present administrationis absolutely committed to the eradication of the practices documented. It has also lost

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its monopoly of junior police education and, partly as a result of this enquiry, the linkbetween its qualifications and SAP promotion have been severed.

2. These included a variety of clandestine contacts with SAP personnel, themselves underphysical threat from their erstwhile colleagues. Justifications and validation techniquesfor such methodology are available in the wider research literature. The rationale for thepractice in this study will be evident from the article.

3. One anecdote illustrates this practice. A former Danish police colleague, Kai Stendorf,monitored SAP crowd control practice at an ANC demonstration after the murder of theSACP leader Chris Hani. The Police General ordered his officers to fire at the crowd andfive of the latter were killed. Stendorf asked the General why he had fired at a relativelypeaceful demonstration. The General replied that if his men had fired in the air, they mighthave killed people in the surrounding office windows. He had no alternative but to fire atthe crowd!

4. For obvious reasons, the names of most of the principals in the case have been changed.

5. Within a month of the completion of the second Report, General Fyvas whose allegedmalfeasance in this and other matters have been documented elsewhere, was promotedby President Mandela to the Commissionership of the SAP – despite a summons fromthe previous Commissioner to the Report’s author to discover who in the SAP had beenresponsible for the concealment of Van der Westhuizen’s Report.

6. The Subject Tutor, a former SAP officer, claimed that ‘teaching experience was not anecessity’ for the provision of the Criminal Procedure and Evidence course.

7. Material was plagiarised from related UNISA Study Guides, leading to a legal financialsettlement in favour of the latter.

8. The only advantage that they possessed over the students they were teaching was thatqualifcation itself, a practice that broke the formal rules governing similar South Africaninstitutions. All records on the competition for these posts had been destroyed. Thereis secondary evidence that better qualified non-SAP candidates had applied and beenexcluded – including a case where a former SAP officer was appointed to teach criminallaw without a legal qualification.

9. All but two of the teaching staff were white and predominantly Afrikaners. The onlyminority member being a Muslim law lecturer who – according to her own account – onthe day of her interview was given coffee by the Head’s Secretary. Afterwards, the Headpointedly ensured that he purchase new coffee cups.

10. The figure is slightly skewed because the internal full-time staff were restricted formallyto marking forty scripts a week.

11. He had been appointed as a temporary lecturer in March 1994, and was therefore com-mitted to additional script marking independently of the excess.

12. More indirect evidence of institutionalised racism appeared in the subject matter of thecourses, none of which provided materials relevant to the daily experiences of officers inthe black, Indian and ‘coloured’ townships.

13. Although this was an exceptional case, there were similar examples. In the police Pro-gramme overall, eighty three externals marked between 1,000 and 2,000 scripts and eightdealt with over 2,000 scripts.

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References

R. Abel (1995)Politics by Other Means: Law in the Struggle against ApartheidLondon:Routledge.

M.E. Brogden & C.D. Shearing (1993)Policing for a New South AfricaLondon: Routledge.R. Erickson (1982)Reproducing Order: A Study of Police Patrol WorkToronto: University of

Toronto Press.J.A. Lee (1981) ‘Some Structural Aspects of Police Deviance in Relations with Minority

groups’ in C.Shearing (ed.)Organisational Police DevianceToronto: Butterworths.M. Los (1982)Corruption in a Communist Country: A Case Study of PolandPaper presented

at the International Sociological Association Annual Conference, Ottawa.D. McBarnet 1981)ConvictionLondon: Macmillan.M.N. McConville, A. Sanders & R. Leng (1991)The Case for the ProsecutionLondon:

Routledge.M. Rees (1980)Muldergate: the Report of the Information Scandal Johannesburg: Macmillan.R. Reiner (1985)The Politics of the PoliceHemel Hempstead: Wheatsheaf.F. Varese (1997) ‘The Transition to the Market and Corruption in Post-Socialist Russia’

Political Studies 45,3.

Mike Brogden is Professor of Criminal Justice, and Director of the Institute ofCriminology and Criminal Justice, at the Queen’s University of Belfast, NorthernIreland.

Preet Nijhar is Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Criminology and Crimi-nal Justice, the Queen’s University of Belfast.

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corruption and the south african police

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