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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Annelize van Wyk was one of the Parliament's longest serving Police Portfolio Committee members. At a roundtable discussion of Viewfinder's findings on IPID, she suggests a path for better Parliamentary oversight of the directorate.
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Former IPID director Robert McBride criticised Viewfinder's exposé in an op-ed. In this response to McBride, Viewfinder points out that neither McBride nor IPID's current management have yet contested a single fact reported by us.
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Parliamentarians grill IPID on reports of statistical manipulation and the covering up of cases. IPID promises to publish its own report on statistical manipulation.
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IPID's position on the history and extent of statistical manipulation has been inconsistent. Days before presenting its annual report to Parliament, management revises it again. Meanwhile, calls for IPID to account continue to mount.
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