Viewfinder’s Police Accountability Tracker is an interface to the Independent Police Investigative Directorate's (IPID) database of more than 47,000 complaints registered against the police between April 2012 and March 2020. Users can use the filters to home in on any police station for an overview of cases registered there. Users can also locate any individual case for a "progress report", as at March 2020. The data demonstrates that police officers implicated in violent crimes routinely escape accountability.
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A “massive reading campaign” for South African schools announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa in 2019 has never got off the ground, despite triumphant claims in Parliament by the Department of Basic Education (DBE). Viewfinder and GroundUp can reveal that the Department’s National Reading Plan – which it had not made publicly available – is a
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An international literacy study has confirmed that 81% of South Africa’s Grade 4 children could not read for meaning in any language in 2021, almost exactly the same proportion as in 2011. This means that a decade of slow progress in reading has been wiped out. The child literacy rate observed by the Progress on International
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Teaching children to read is fundamental to their future success. But for a country already battling massive youth unemployment and an adult literacy crisis, it’s emerged that close to 80% of Grade 4 learners cannot read with understanding in any of the 11 official languages. Government has warned of the crisis and, in 2019, President
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In January 2020, the army and police barged into Wasiela Isaacs’ family home in Athlone on the Cape Flats and arrested her son, Adam. Days later, he died in hospital from blunt force trauma injuries. Two years on, as the Isaacs family awaits justice, a Viewfinder and Carte Blanche investigation has revealed that one of
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In January 2020, Athlone police Sergeant Giovanni Gabriels led a team of constables in a joint operation with the army. At the time, he already had several watchdog findings for assault against him, and he was on a final written warning. Days after the operation, one of the men arrested, 36-year-old Adam Isaacs, died in
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After sustained criticism in Parliament this year, the South African Police Service (SAPS) has issued a circular to call out its commanders for their “inaction” and “reluctance” when officers under their command are implicated in serious crimes. Issued on 8 October, the circular warns that police supervisors who fail to act “promptly” in such cases
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On average, police in South Africa kill someone every day. Viewfinder has now published the police watchdog’s database on these killings, along with other complaints of police brutality and corruption: more than 47,000 such cases registered between 2012 and 2020. A new Police Accountability Tracker dashboard, which houses this data, allows anyone in South Africa
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