The image of the police in this country has always taken a battering almost second to none. This has largely been due to the history of the erstwhile South African Police (SAP) and their stooges that masqueraded as a police service in the former so-called homelands.
This was an image that would always have taken some doing to clean and cleanse as the former police forces merged into the current law enforcement agency envisaged as a service in a new people-centred policing regime.
Much as efforts to improve the image are a never-ending exercise, headline-grabbing bad habits would always surface that seem to be case of a two-steps-forward-three-backwards scenario played over and over again.
In recent weeks, the police service came for a hammering when the reports into the probe into the riots last July when our men and women in blue seemed as much as clueless as they were powerless to deal with the thuggery that left more than 300 people dead and business razed to the ground, some never to rise again.
In many minds it would have fed into the imagery of the bumbling, good-for-nothing reputation often, not without basis but utterly unfair, made of the first line of defence of the rule of law that police are meant to be.
It is in this vein of the quest to prop excellence in policing that we applaud the police for what went down in Rosettenville, a Johannesburg suburb, on Monday when a crack team of police officers took out a gang of bandits who were ready to carry out a cash-in-transit heist.
Such heists often make headlines and are seemingly often carried out without consequences for this marauding gangs that appear a law unto themselves, often leaving behind bodies to be counted.
There may have been bloodshed, but what are thugs, opening fire on police – their best to keep law-abiding citizens, expecting in return?
When the guns fell silence and the dust settled, eight robbers were dead while some police officers had sustained injuries. Yesterday, news broke that a policeman had also died in the skirmish. Ten members of the gang were arrest and the remainder were still at large at the time of going to press.
We applaud the good work done by the police in stopping the criminals dead in their tracks, thereby saving lives which such ruthless killers would no doubt not hesitate to endanger in future. Of course, there will be investigations carried out by the Independent Police Investigations Directorate into the deaths as demanded by law.
However, it feels good to know that we still have such highly trained officers willing to serve the nation amid all the negativity usually associated with the police.
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