Top cop in row over sentencing remarks
A high-ranking Western Cape police official is in hot water for speaking out against alleged lenient sentences handed to suspected gangsters.
|||Cape Town - The Department of Justice in the Western Cape has threatened to charge a high-ranking police official in the province who has spoken out against alleged lenient sentences handed to suspected gangsters.
Provincial head of the Department of Justice Hishaam Mohamed yesterday cautioned Major-General Gregory Goss - who heads the Mitchells Plain policing cluster - against raising issues in the media, when there are “internal mechanisms” in place to deal with them.
Mohamed said Goss could be charged for “attempting to bring the department into disrepute”.
Goss complained after Shameeg Mathieson, an alleged Laughing Boys gang member who had been found guilty of being in the illegal possession of a firearm, was on Tuesday handed a sentence of 340 hours community service.
Mathieson’s case had been dragging on since his arrest in 2014 after he pointed a firearm at Lieutenant Colonel Desmond Laing.
Laing recalled a tense stand-off between himself and Mathieson, who was 17 at the time.
“I also had my gun drawn,” Laing said. “But I don’t think I was going to shoot at him because he was just a laaitie, you know.”
Laing said even though Mathieson is in his late teens, he had been implicated in several crimes, including the murder of a 50-year-old man.
“These kids are being used by the gangsters who themselves are cowards. They (the gangsters) use the kids to carry their guns and sell their drugs, because they know the justice system is lenient on underage criminals,” Laing said.
Laing said there were “many more” similar cases.
In another matter, finalised last month, a man found to have been in the illegal possession of a gun and ammunition was sentenced to five years imprisonment, suspended for five years.
“It would be another story if they were handed a five-year sentence, suspended for three years,” Goss said.
“We know the chance of re-offending is big, so we’d catch them then.”
Goss said police worked “very hard” to secure guilty verdicts, “but what is the use of that hard work if the Justice Department is just going to let criminals go?”
Mohamed said he rejected Goss’s sentiment “with all the contempt it deserves”.
“He (Goss) doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Mohamed said. “If he’s trying to bring the department into disrepute, we will charge and prosecute him because it’s a crime to say such things.”
Mohamed said he’d report to provincial commissioner of police Lieutenant-General Khombinkosi Jula and not to Goss, whom he called a “junior head”.
Earlier this month, Hanover Park residents staged a protest outside Parliament against the killings of youths by gangs.
The protest was led by the Alcardo Andrews Foundation.
In its memorandum, the foundation requested separate meetings with Jula and Mohamed. It demanded Jula take “an urgent look into sloppy investigations and murder dockets suspiciously going missing”.
From Mohamed’s department, the foundation demanded “no bail for murderers” and “no bail for gangsters caught in possession of illegal firearms”.
siyabonga.sesant@inl.co.za
Weekend Argus