Three senior police officers, including the former acting Wentworth station commander, have been arrested for defeating and obstructing the course of justice after more than 200 incomplete dockets were found lying at the station’s filing room.
Lieutenant-Colonel Jaichand Dhanasar, of Phoenix, who was the acting station commander at Wentworth until May last year, Captain Edwin Oliver, of Montclair, and Captain Sivalingum Pillay, of Kingsburgh, were arrested by officers of the provincial detectives task team and appeared briefly in the Wentworth Magistrate’s Court on Monday.
Dhanasar is now the Phoenix crime prevention unit head, Oliver is the detective branch commander at Wentworth and Pillay is his deputy.
According to the police, 262 case dockets, which had not been investigated, were found in the station’s filing room, which is usually used to file completed dockets.
The dockets, which were for cases including hijackings, robberies and assaults, dated back to 2005 and were discovered after a search was conducted by the new station commander, Colonel Deon Singh, in December last year.
The dockets were allegedly kept in the room and were not investigated. If the people who had opened the cases had not queried the status of the investigations, then the dockets were closed and ignored.
Nine people had questioned investigations into charges they had laid - these dockets were removed from the room and assigned to detectives.
It is not yet clear how the 262 dockets had impacted on the station’s crime statistics.
In court on Monday, the prosecutor, N Msiya, said the State was not opposed to the men being released on a warning. He requested a lengthy adjournment, saying the State needed to consult with the Director of Public Prosecutions and query the status of the officers’ employment.
It is believed that further charges could also be added as the investigation progresses.
The matter was adjourned to April 12, with the three released on a warning.
Their arrests come after nine officers at Pietermaritzburg’s Mountain Rise police station were found guilty of misconduct and manipulating crime statistics at an internal disciplinary and given a suspended sentence in December last year.
The Independent Complaints Directorate found that the officers had manipulated crime statistics in a 2007/08 crime report to create the impression that crime within their jurisdiction had decreased.
Dockets of cases deemed to have little prospect of being solved were allegedly left out of the reporting system, ensuring that crime statistics returns were low.
Due to the decrease in crime, the station was named the best police station in the province and given a cash incentive. - The Mercury
