Introduction

Despite the remarkable strides made by the new democratic government to combat the issue of crime that continues to engulf many parts of the country, the issue of immorality and corruption among some police officers makes the fight against crime a futile activity. While there is a myriad of police officers who love their job and always act with integrity in the day-to-day execution of their duties, a handful of police officers are said to be criminals in South African Police uniforms. In this regard, morally corrupt police officers are the ones who enable criminals to continuously commit more crimes.

How Morally Corrupt Police Officers Contribute to Crime?

Police officers who often take bribes from criminals are the ones who contribute to the rise and continuation of crime in South Africa. This is because once a bribe has been offered to a police officer by criminals, they will commit the crime, knowing that they will not be arrested. Due to the corrupt nature of these police officers, some criminals, who are friends with police officers, even use the guns and bullets of police officers to commit certain crimes. In a province such as KwaZulu-Natal, it has been alleged several times that some police officers are friends with iziNkabi (hitmen). Not only are they friends with them, they also work with them and know everything about these hitmen and their trail of crimes. Yet, they cannot disclose such information because they don’t want their hitmen friends to go to jail. Worryingly, some police officers even hire hitmen to get rid of colleagues that they find to be a problem, especially in cases where a particular police officer is contesting a position of promotion at the workplace with another police officer.

The Role Money Plays in Corrupting Some Police Officers

In cases where a police officer has been bribed and promised money by some real perpetrators of crime, those police officers are likely to protect the real culprits involved in the commission of the crime in question and implicate the wrong people into the matter. This means that money corrupts police officers to not do their work accordingly. One notable example of police immorality and corruption is the reports of border police officers who often allow illegal and undocumented foreigners to enter the country, following the payment of bribes by these illegal immigrants to the border police officers. However, the sad part is that most of these illegal and undocumented foreigners are the ones implicated in drug smuggling and human trafficking in South Africa.

The Impact of Police Immorality and Corruption on the State

While the morally corrupt police officers selfishly engage in acts of immorality and corruption in the execution of their duties, this sometimes leads to wrongful arrests of innocent individuals, which at a later time costs the state a lot of money when these wrongfully convicted individuals, through their defence lawyers, opt to sue the state.

Conclusion

Not all police officers are morally corrupt. Some of them are committed to serving their communities with integrity. However, a handful of police officers in the South African Police Service are morally corrupt to such an extent that they contribute to the rise and unending crime in South Africa, especially when they prioritize the taking of bribes rather than doing their work accordingly. The government should put in place ways to punish police officers who act corruptly in the execution of their duties to deter others from engaging in a similar corrupt activity.