WARRANTLESS SEARCHES AND AWARDS FOR DAMAGES IN LIGHT OF THE JUDGMENT IN Shashape v The Minister of Police Case No.: 1566/2018

The law of criminal procedure is “double functional” in that it not only dictates the proper procedure for the execution of police functions but also serves as a ground of justification in substantive law against otherwise unlawful conduct. Nevertheless, personal liberties, even in the pursuit of justice in a country overrun by crime, cannot be sacrificed indiscriminately simply to further the diligent investigation of crime.An example of personal liberties being sacrificed in favour of the pursuit of justice is the search and seizure of private spaces of individuals. Search and seizure may be effected both with and without a warrant and is regulated by the Criminal Procedure Act 51 of 1977 (CPA). However, where a police official acts outside of this legislative matrix, his or her conduct is not regarded as lawful; he or she may not rely on official capacity as a ground of justification against an (unlawful) search. In such instances, the Minister of Police may be vicariously liable in delict owing to the unlawful conduct of police officials. Such cases are relatively rare.This contribution will focus on two specific aspects – namely, search and seizure conducted without a warrant, and subsequent awards for damages based on unlawful, warrantless searches. The recent judgment in Shashape v The Minister of Police (WHC (unreported) 2020-04-30 Case no 1566/2018 (Shashape)) is discussed against this backdrop.

WRONGFUL ARREST: A BRIEF SURVEY OF THE IMPACT OF THE CONSTITUTION IN RECENT CASE LAW

In recent times there has been a proliferation of press reports about ordinary, law-abiding citizens who suffered the indignity and inconvenience of a wrongful (unlawful) arrest at the hands of officers of the South African Police Service or Metro Police Services. According to the most recent of these reports, this increase in the incidence of wrongful arrests have even resulted in deliberations between members of the Law Society of the Northern Provinces and the top management of the SAPS, in which the latter undertook to pay special attention to the training of police officers in order to better the present state of affairs. It is not far-fetched to describe thepresent situation on the ground in respect of wrongful arrests as epidemic. In recent interviews with attorneys who have been representing clients in wrongful arrest claims against the Minister of Safety and Security, the present writer was told about certain standard practices regarding arrests: it would seem that it is a favourite practice among certain police officials to arrest suspects on a Friday, or even a Thursday afternoon, in order to prolong the normal 48-hour maximum period of detention before bringing an arrestee before court. Furthermore, metro police spokespersons often announce, at the beginning of some road-safety drive or crack-down on traffic offenders, that certain types of offenders will, without exception, be arrested. The worst recent example recounted to the author of lamentable conduct in this context on the part of a high-ranking police official concerns an order issued on a Friday afternoon in which the officers under his command were ordered to endeavour arresting more persons of a specific ethnic group, seeing that the weekend population of the police cells under his command did not reflect the demographics of his jurisdiction!

LIABILITY OF THE STATE FOR RAPE BY A POLICEMAN: THE SAGA TAKES A NEW DIRECTION Minister of Safety and Security v F 2011 3 SA 487 (SCA)

The locus classicus and trend-setting decision for the vicarious liability of the state for the rape of a woman by a police official, is certainly K v Minister of Safety and Security. Here the plaintiff (K), a young woman, became stranded late at night. Three on-duty police officials, dressed in full uniform, offered to take her home in a police vehicle. On the way she was raped by all three of them. O’Regan J held that the state was vicariously liable for the conduct of the policemen. According to the standard test for vicarious liability, which was formulated in Minister of Police v Rabie, an employer may only escape vicarious liability if the employee, viewed subjectively, has not only exclusively promoted his own interests, but, viewed objectively, has also disengaged himself from the duties of his contract of employment to such an extent that a sufficiently close connection between the employee’s conduct and his employment is absent. Applying this test as informed by the constitutional Bill of Rights, O’Regan J found that although the policemen exclusively promoted their own interests by raping the plaintiff, a “sufficiently close connection” nevertheless existed between the conduct of the police and their work to hold their employer vicariously liable, for the following reasons: there was a constitutional and statutory duty on the state as well as the policemen to prevent crime and to protect members of public; the policemen offered to help the plaintiff and she acted reasonably by accepting the offer and trusting them; and the conduct of the policemen consisted simultaneously of a commissio (the brutal rape) and an omissio (their failure to protect her against the rape).

Going Beyond the Blue: The Utility of Emergency Medical Services Data in Understanding Violent Crime

National victimization data suggest less than 50% of violent crime incidents are reported to the police. Official reports of crime to police, however, are often the only type of data used for the analysis of violence problems, the identification of geographic concentrations of violent crime, and the selection of targets for police and prevention resources. Yet, the question remains, are estimates of violent crime prevalence and location distorted from a unilateral reliance on police data? Here, we examine whether emergency medical service (EMS) data collected by the fire department are spatially concentrated in the same way as police data and whether these data can help identify instances of violence unreported to police in the city of Seattle between 2009 and 2011. We find high levels of concentration in both police and EMS data and evidence that new information is learned about the location of violence problems from utilizing multiple data sources. Overall, these findings contribute to a small but growing body of work that demonstrates the utility of nonconventional data in the identification of crime and harm concentrations of interest.

eLegalls: Enriching a Legal Justice System in the Emerging Legal Informatics and Legal Tech Era

The research footprint of Information Technology (IT) in a legal system has not grown with the same pace as it has penetrated other domains. More specifically, in developing countries such as India, where the digitalization revolution is underway, the growth of legal informatics (LI) is still premature and very limited traces of IT can be observed to assist and elevate the legal system, which still functions very much in an old school way. The faster growth of population and the diminishing proportion of judicial executives and the deteriorating law and order situation along with declining human rights demand the urgent evolution of LI to grow at a very rapid pace to attain its maturity. However, the human harassments are pretty prevailing across the nation, but its intensity increases manifold when it comes to the law-enforcement agencies tasked with responsible policing, more specifically, the state police, which often operates with compromised work ethics. The situation becomes more appalling with a vulnerable population, especially women. As a result, such a population often does not muster enough courage to go to a police station to file their complaints despite acute mental and emotional pain. This is to avoid further trauma by police harassment and ergo a large number of cases go unnoticed. An underprivileged rape victim, who tries to file a report by going to a police station is a classic example of such a situation; where she is not only denied, but also gets harassed by insensitive police official(s) at the station; consequently, a good number of such victims do not go and their cases are not reported.In this research work, we have developed a computational framework, called eLegalls, an LI-enabled innovation, as an effective solution to the above stated issues. The eLegalls system facilitates users to file their reports to police in their geographic jurisdiction, through its efficient and secure interface without any in-person visit. The eLegalls will help the vulnerable population to avoid unwanted denial and impending harassment by the police official(s) at the police station. The system is also equipped with some secure and pertinent features for the lawyers or attorneys to efficiently advocate in assigned cases. The eLegalls is envisioned to eventually be a successful legal tech, effectively serving the community.

An Examination of Subway Sex Offense Modus Operandi: A Case of Seoul, South Korea

Subway sex offenses are a serious issue in the nations around world, but existing research has failed to explore the offense types or patterns systematically. In order to fill this gap, the authors employed Crime Script Analysis (CSA) to examine the two most common subway sex offenses in Seoul, South Korea. Specifically, the authors assessed the reasoning behind the steps taken to prepare for, carry out, and complete harassment and surreptitious recording. The offenses committed in the subway stations around the city of Seoul were analyzed based on the interviews with the subway police, official crime reports, and crime case files. Drawing from the findings, theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Reform of the Russian police: pluralism of approaches to implementation in the middle of the XIX century

The reform of the police system is an actual problem of any state, because the situation of the police, which is adequate to the realities of state and legal development, is a required condition for ensuring public order and protecting the state system at various historical stages of the country’s development. Mid XIX century for Russia became a time of transformation of all spheres of public life, which required adjustments to the organization and activities of the police. The article is devoted to the analysis of police reform projects of the 1850–1860s. Turning to these storylines makes it possible to see the complexity of preparing and conducting police reform in the context of the fight between a conservative and enlightened bureaucracy, where each group had its own idea of the structure and competence of the police. The reform projects of the Russian police are characterized on the basis of the analysis of archival materials and published documents of office work of state bodies, prepared by the famous writer, a police official M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin; the head of the Zemsky department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Y. A. Soloviev; a commission created by the Main Committee on Peasant Affairs, composed of S. S. Lansky, V. N. Panin, M. N. Muravyev and Y. I. Rostovtsev; Commission on provincial and district institutions led by N. A. Milyutin. It is done the conclusion about the phased implementation of the draft law prepared by the Commission on provincial and district institutions under the leadership of N. A. Milyutin and about the attention of the government to the organization and functioning of the police is a condition for maintaining law and order and an important factor in the sustainable progressive development of the state at each stage its historical development.

LANGUAGE MEANS OF FOLK NARRATIVE IN THE STORY BY A. F. PISEMSKY «THE TALE OF THE ROOSTER»

The article presents a philological analysis of the system of linguistic means that determine the stylistic distinctness of the story by Alexei Feofilaktovich Pisemsky «The tale of the rooster» (1865). The purpose of the study is to identify the structural, semantic and pragmatic properties of the textual key elements that create a speech portrait of the narrator, dialogize his story and provide the semantic integrity of the narrative. The study of linguistic techniques and means of stylization of the colloquial speech in a tale is based on the peculiarities of the subject-speech organization in a work of fiction: the convergence of the first person narrator’s speech and the storyteller’s speech, forming a two-voiced narration; a variety of artistic dialogues that reproduce the folk speech of peasants and district police officers. The pragmatic potential of the analyzed linguistic units is manifested in their active influence on the composition and content organization of the fairy tale narration. The article also examines the key metaphorical images created by the lexico-phraseological and syntactic means. A careful consideration in the analysis is also given to hyperbolic comparative patterns and gradation series, which are expressive characteristics of events and characters’ actions. The fictional dialogues are analyzed in detail, revealing the main conflict of the fairy tale narration: the clash of a greedy and hypocritical police officer with the village peasants who seek to avoid the discontent of the authorities at any cost. The key semantic elements combine separate compositional parts of the story into a common narrative space and enhance the dynamics of the action. Dialogization of the narrative monologue is carried out by including the direct speech of the characters and the active interaction of the subject-speech plans of the narrator and the primary storyteller. The comic undertone in a fairy tale narration is created by textual repetitions of different types, parallel syntactic constructions and gradation series, contextual synonymy and antonymy, evaluative vocabulary and phraseology, which forms the emotiveness of a literary text and conveys the irony of the narrator in relation to the events depicted, as well as the changing feelings and moods of a hypocritical police official. As a result of the study of the linguistic features in the story by A. F. Pisemsky «The tale of the rooster», the author of the article brings into focus a system of speech means and stylization techniques that determine the peculiarities of the tale narration and have a high pragmatic potential, as well as explicate the conceptual content of the text and ensure its structural and semantic integrity.

Communicating Secure Based Feeling: Content Analysis on Indonesian Police Official Account

The development of social media in Indonesia, especially instagram has changed the paradigm of public relations in Indonesia. In the past five years, data from several studies have shown a change in the use of conventional public relations media towards the use of information-based technology and big data. This article will describe descriptively how security is built by Indonesian police social media. This article uses Krippendorf content analysis in collecting data and analyzing data. The results of the study showed that the security was successfully built by the Indonesian police through engagement on Instagram