Rogue cops cannot be allowed to harass journalists

The crime intelligence unit in the SA Police Service is supposed to play the most crucial role against organised crime and corruption in the country.

Hundreds of millions of rand are spent each year by the taxpayer to enable this division to infiltrate criminal gangs and identify criminal activities before they occur.

In the democratic era, crime intelligence has had some spectacular successes — like when it broke the back of the right-wing terror group, Boeremag and crippled some of the most daring cash-in-transit heist gangs in the early 2000s.

However, it has also been a source of much concern with evidence — especially during the era of disgraced crime intelligence boss General Richard Mdluli — that it was being abused to unduly influence politics.

There were even allegations of people’s phones being illegally tapped.

But that was during the “state capture” years — when no state institution seemed sacrosanct to the political elite that wanted to enrich itself by any means at the time.

With the collapse of the state capture project, there was this belief that those dark days were behind us and that SA had returned to its democratic traditions of free speech and respect for the rule of law.

But revelations at the Madlanga commission earlier this week that crime intelligence officers, probably acting at the behest of one of their senior bosses, conducted surveillance of a journalist and allegedly broke into her home, indicate that even under the so-called New Dawn era, there are still those in the state who use criminal means against those they see as threats.

The break-in at the home of the Daily Maverick’s Marianne Thamm, just after she had written a number of stories that were critical of some CI bosses, should be of concern to all democrats.

We hope that they will act with speed in reinvestigating the matter, especially given the evidence presented at the Madlanga commission suggesting that crime intelligence boss General Feroz Khan had identified Thamm as a problem for his faction in the police.

There can be no true democracy and freedom of speech in a country where rogue cops are allowed to harass journalists.