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1989 Acta Juridica 139 (1989)
Policing the Police: A Comparative Survey of Police Control Mechanisms in the United States, South Africa and the United Kingdom

handle is hein.journals/actj1989 and id is 149 raw text is: Policing the Police: A Comparative Survey of Police Control Mechanisms in the United States, South Africa and the United Kingdom NICHOLAS HAYSOM* Attorney of the Supreme Court 'Misconduct on the part of individual policemen is a phenomenon which must obviously occur in any police force. Two aspects at least make this phenomenon rather different in South Africa. On the one hand there is the possibility of misconduct being directed at a particular racial group .... The other aspect is the disturbing degree of official indifference to such misconduct. , A lieutenant in the South African Riot Police described the actions of the Riot Squad as brutal and unprofessional. 'They were just hitting people. They didn't care if they were innocent bystanders or not. They were running after them even when they were fleeing, hitting them. It seemed to me that they were enjoying themselves, feasting on the people. The Squad stormed the kids like wild dogs. You could see the killer instinct in their eyes. The cause of the riots in Mitchell's Plain was due to the unprofessional doings of the Riot Unit at Mitchell's Plain schools which I witnessed with my own eyes.'2 The powers of the police, even in a democratic society, are awesome. The special powers granted to the police to stop, search, arrest, detain, seize, and to keep persons or groups under surveillance constitute considerable powers to invade the privacy and freedom of individual citizens. In addition police are afforded the right to the legitimate use of force, including deadly force, to underwrite their general and specific powers. These powers combined with the increasing centralization of police organization and resources, and the increasing sophistication of police technology, place the police force in a particularly powerful position, which is capable of abuse outside the limits of legality, or capable of being used as an instrument of tyranny within those limits. The origin of police powers has been variously attributed to the function of the police as custodians of public order, or as derived from a species of social contract in the furtherance of the police function as detectors and preventors of crime.3 How much power police agencies should have, what limits should be established on their capacities, what controls should be exercised over their discretion are issues -which have * BA(Hons) LLB; Centre for Applied Legal Studies, University of the Witwatersrand; Attorney of the Supreme Court. 1 B van Nierkerk 'The Police in Apartheid Society' in Law,Justice and Society Report of the Spro-cas Legal Commission (1972) 56. 2 Interview with Lt Gregory Rockman, SAPA Press Release September 1989. 3 S A Robilliard &J McEwan Police Powers and the Individual (1986) 1-8; R Reiner Law and Politics 171-4.