Every year, thousands of criminal complaints are levelled against the national and metro police services in South Africa.
This dashboard is an interface to the Independent Police Investigative Directorate's (IPID) raw database of these complaints, as registered between 1 April 2012 and 31 March 2025. These data were obtained from IPID’s annual reports and by means of Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) requests by Viewfinder and are published under an open data licence.
This data is shared mostly as received from IPID. Errors in station names and case numbers (CCINs) have been corrected where possible.
Case descriptions, which identify individual officers and victims, have been removed.
Cases by Precinct
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Case overview
These top level stats are audited numbers from IPID annual reports.
IPID’s provincial offices register cases that are reported to it by complainants or are referred to it by police stations. Once a case is registered it is assigned to a case worker to investigate. If evidence of wrongdoing is found, IPID will refer completed investigations to the police for disciplinary action and / or to the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) for criminal charges. From that point, the process is dependent on police disciplinary officers and / or prosecutors to take forward in hearings and / or court. Still, IPID is overwhelmed and many cases are “closed” without being properly investigated and forwarded to the police and the NPA. In other cases, the police and prosecutors are reluctant to take charges forward, despite IPID’s recommendations that this should happen.
The data demonstrates that police officers in South Africa stand accused of an overwhelming number of often serious crimes every year. Still, very few are held accountable or face any form of disciplinary and criminal sanction. To learn why this is, read Viewfinder’s investigations:
Case Distribution by Province
Cases Over Time
Cases Over Time by Province
Cases Closed by Manner
Disciplinary Cases
Criminal Cases
List of Cases
Below is a list of searchable case reports that are sourced via a PAIA request to IPID every year. Please note that this data is incomplete - several details (such as province and station) are missing from 2022-23 and 2024-35, and no data has been supplied for 2023-24. The numbers, therefore, do not exactly match those in the dash above.
Click on any case to see its history.
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CCN | Financial Year | Class Summary | Province | Metro | Precinct (Station) |
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Researchers and journalists may request additional data, including redacted case descriptions and archives from 1994-2012 by e-mailing daneel@viewfinder.org.za.