News reporter: 15 people are dead
after a mass shooting at a bar in South Africa.
Police said a group of armed men entered the tavern
and started shooting at the patrons inside.
[music playing, woman crying]
Zing: In July 2022, South Africa was rocked by a spate of bar shootings.
Twenty-two people were killed at three different bars
in one weekend alone.
In one shooting, the gunman used AK-47s,
with more than a hundred empty cartridges found at the scene.
But how did they obtain such powerful guns?
Some point the finger at what might be considered an unlikely source:
the police.
South Africa’s rising gun violence
is largely driven by the trade of illegal guns
on the black market.
Zing: On average, 23 people are shot and killed in South Africa daily.
Many of the weapons used are illegal,
stolen from police stations or private security firms.
More than 500 firearms were reportedly lost from
the South African Police Services.
One hundred and fifty-eight firearms,
which were being stored at the Norwood SAP 13 store
have been stolen.
In January 2022, more than 150 guns were found to be missing
from a single station in Johannesburg.
Forensic evidence of these same weapons
revealed them to be factoring in at crime scenes across the country.
Police are generally considered to be
the most corrupt public institution in just about any country.
The illegal gun trade in South Africa,
said to be both perpetuated and pursued by police,
shows the blurred lines between policing and lawbreaking
that are a reality all over the world.
This is
In this episode,
we’re looking at how corrupt cops can aid and abet criminals,
continuing the cycle of crime and keeping themselves in the job.
[music playing]
Zing: To start, it’s important to understand the conditions
and circumstances that foster corruption within a police force
and allow it to thrive.
What feeds that is social dysfunction,
as well as limited economic opportunity,
and then the exploitation of all of that by these gangs
and criminal networks.
Bad cops don't come from nowhere.
They’re created because they’re tolerated.
News reporter: There are allegations that police cartels and gangs
are working together.
In countries where there are high rates of killings by police
or high rates of police corruption in general,
it usually goes alongside inadequate laws, inequality,
and human rights violations.
News reporter: The Honduras national police
arresting their former president at his home
after the US requested his extradition to the States
to face drug trafficking and weapons charges.
Governments lacking in trust and transparency—
with politicians who are themselves corrupt—
often contribute to a lawless environment.
Typically around, you know,
areas where organized crime is incredibly active
or those organized crime networks have really found a way
to infiltrate police structures in South Africa and Brazil,
where broadly within society, there are issues,
whether it’s in politics or in other arenas
where there’s corruption in and of itself,
that’s where policing institutions may become corrupted themselves.
In South Africa, police corruption today
is impossible to divorce from the country’s history of apartheid.
In poor Black communities in particular,
cops still aren’t readily trusted.
Ziyanda: Your average police officer in South Africa
is recruited from a community that’s low income,
that’s under-resourced,
and they themselves may not have chosen policing
as their first profession.
What that then does is open up a lot of doors and windows
and opportunities for organized crime to approach police officers
and say, “Do you want to make more money?”
“Do you want to keep your family safer?”
“You could do so by colluding with us
either to turn a blind eye or to make evidence disappear.”
Zing: In 2016, former police colonel Christiaan Prinsloo
pled guilty to a laundry list of charges,
including racketeering
and unlawful possession and sale of firearms.
Every weekend, there is somebody dying.
We don’t know whether it’s because of all these guns
that was selling out to gangsters.
With the help of a colleague who worked in the police munitions hold,
Christiaan Prinsloo was found to have stolen
more than 2,000 firearms in police possession over ten years,
generating more than 2 million rand, or more than $100,000.
Ballistics have linked guns that he took from evidence
and sold to gangsters
to the murder of hundreds of people, on the Cape Flats in particular,
and the deaths of over 80 children.
The problem is far from confined to South Africa.
In Brazil, the lines are even further blurred,
as police, struggling to combat organized criminal groups,
instead cooperate with them to maintain control.
In Rio de Janeiro, this is actually very common.
Police have a practice of seizing guns from the drug dealers
and the militias
and selling them back to the militias and drug dealers,
maybe for a different group, a rival group.
Zing: Most militias have at least some members
who are also serving officers.
Illegal firearms are readily available,
with the market controlled by corrupt military and police officers
with connections to transnational criminal networks and gangs.
Firearms seized by police
are often lost, misplaced, or stolen.
In 2017, nearly 100 officers in Rio de Janeiro were arrested
and charged with supplying powerful assault weapons
and police intelligence to organized crime groups.
I think one of the main issues as well in Brazil
is the lack of accountability around policing.
I think because people in Brazil, like in South Africa,
feel desperately unsafe,
particularly in low-income communities,
and so they’ve ceded an enormous amount of power to the police.
[gunfire]
News reporter: A police operation gets underway
in the Alemão Favela in Rio.
They happen almost daily, and they’re always violent.
But in the subsequent years,
the alliance between organized crime and corrupt police in Rio
has only strengthened,
and violence has increased.
Twenty-five people, including a police officer,
were killed in a ferocious gun battle.
Zing: In the first four months of 2020,
Rio police killed 606 people—
and that’s by their own official count.
Even Rio authorities have begun to acknowledge
that large parts of the state are no longer in their control.
But when the militia also has ties to city and state politicians,
the rot is able to fester and spread.
It’s not a dirty apple.
It's a rotten organization that is producing rotten apples everywhere.
Police commanders, they show the number of people
that they expel from the police every year
to justify that they are doing something.
But they are not doing something because they are distributing blame.
They are not responsiblizing the chain of command,
understanding the organizational factors
that are favoring police corruption
and sometimes pushing officers towards police corruption.
That’s the worst thing.
[music playing]
So, how can we stop corrupt cops in their tracks?
Sometimes it reflects a fundamental issue
with how the police force is structured—
insufficient resourcing, for example,
inadequate training and pay.
Sometimes the problem is bigger,
going all the way up to the top of the force,
the government, or both.
Even laws can protect police officers
and obstruct justice.
The main cop combating corruption in South Africa was shot dead.
Is this the risk of trying to address corruption?
Now, you’ll remember that Kinnear, a top Cape Town anti-gang unit boss,
was gunned down outside his home.
The consequences of reporting police corruption
can be seriously hazardous.
I mean, if you’re a senior police officer
at a very high level reporting corruption,
it would not be difficult
for the others to work out who it was who spilled the beans
and would have to fear for their lives.
But as much as corruption is a structural issue,
reflecting flaws in a system,
it's also a human one.
When even the lowest-ranking cop has some power,
the possibility of corruption is inevitable.
[music playing]