Cape Town - One of Cape Town’s finest men in blue, Colonel Dawood Laing, bade farewell to the SAPS as he officially retired this week after more than 40 years of service.
The highly praised cop hung up his lapels and said his final goodbyes to colleagues at the Grassy Park police station.
In an exclusive interview with the Weekend Argus, the passionate commander, who is known for tackling gang bosses and drug dealers head-on, said he has watched the decline in ethos in the police force amid a rise in crime.
Laing said that as a 13-year-old boy living in Bellville he met a SAPS dog handler who inspired his love for the police. After matriculating in 1981, he enrolled with the SAPS and spent a year at the training college in Pretoria.
“When I was a student constable at Bellville, I met two Warrant Officers named Van Staden and Arendse. In those days, they would stand next to you and observe as you took a statement, and if it was wrong, they would tear it up in front of you and make you start again. That way, we never had problems and most cases were watertight when they went to court,” he said.
Between 1986 and 1992, Laing worked his way up the ranks and said officers had to enrol in an academy to get a new rank in those years.
“You were in training for 16 weeks and each week you would write a test. If you failed once, you were allowed to rewrite and if you failed again you were sent back and would have to reapply to be a candidate. We earned every star on our shoulders.”
In 1992 he was sent to work in Khayelitsha where he experienced the impact of the political upheaval for the first time.
“I didn’t even know where Khayelitsha was. As I arrived, I met Constable George and I remember how friendly he was. He told me he loved working in Khayelitsha and less than an hour later I was called to the scene where he had been shot with a rifle. At the time, due to political fights, there was a a group targeting police officers as an attack on the state and every week one police officer was killed.”
In 1994, he was promoted and became well known in Mitchells Plain as he headed up drug operations targeted at high-level gang bosses, such as Glen Khan, leader of the Junior Cisco Yakkies (JCY) gang.
But this was also the first time he came face to face with police corruption.
“We arrested Khan with a firearm for which he didn’t have a licence. At the time, the law stated you could lend your gun to another person for 14 days as long as you wrote a letter. He had no letter and we arrested him. Later, a police officer claimed that Khan had a letter that was apparently in his underpants and that is when I realised that there existed a corrupt relationship between the officer and the gang boss.”
Over the years Laing continually sounded the alarm over corruption of fellow officers, which resulted in the arrests of officers for various crimes, from bribery to rape.
Laing was also part of the investigation into the notorious Station Strangler, and during the 1990s led searches along with community members in the sand dunes.
“Until today I believe that Norman Simons was not convicted of all the murders he committed. There is no way there was a copycat killer as the intricacies of the docket were never publicly disclosed at the time of the murders. Each case had the same modus operandi and the profile of each victim was exactly the same. I feel bad for the families who never got closure,” he said.
Laing later worked at Nyanga SAPS and shortly after 2010 his work was thrust into the limelight as he was made the head of visible policing at Philippi SAPS.
Each week he compiled a team of the toughest officers and along with the help of metro police and law enforcement officers he clamped down on gang bosses and drug dealers in Hanover Park as he confiscated their stashes and drug earnings. In 2018, angry residents marched to the station following reports that he had been promoted to colonel and moved to Grassy Park SAPS as the station commander.
Laing said after years of putting in the elbow grease with eager residents and committed cops they made strides in tackling gangsters.
During this time his team also faced an uprising from gangs and their affiliates who openly attacked officers. Laing said the murder of Constable Ashwin Pedro, who was shot and killed while trying to arrest a gunman, will forever be one of his hardest days as a police officer as he stood over the lifeless body of a dedicated officer who paid the ultimate price.
While his successor has not yet been named, Laing says he is confident in the legacy he has left behind. For now, he plans to complete a photography course and start a business.
He said in his years as an officer he has realised that the system has failed South Africans.
“I realised as government organisations combined we are not serious about fighting crime. If we can just fix the long time it takes for a case to get to trial, you can greatly improve the conviction rate. If we can just fix the labs, get the test done and get the reports into the dockets, get the docket to trial and stop all the delays at court, you will see a change,” he added.