'Spot Fines' Do Not Exist At Law

Over the years, heavy handedness and selective enforcement of the law have encroa-ched and taken root within the Zimbabwe Republic Police.

It is important to expose a few ways by which the police have violated people's basic rights in complete disregard of the law. The so-called "ticket" offences provide a better illustration of the force's obsession with depriving citizens of their freedom. These offences usually occur in traffic, liquor, assault and other minor transgressions covered under the Miscellaneous Offences Act (Chapter 9:15).

With specific reference to traffic offences, the common perception is that the issuing of tickets has been done, and is still being done more as a fund-raising exercise than a law enforcement measure. This only exposes the police's hypocrisy and further confirms that certain traffic blitzes and other operations are not done in good faith.

Section 356 read together with Section 141 of the Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act (Chapter 9:07) provides that an accused person may pay a fine for certain minor offences if he she does not want to appear in court. This section obviously makes payment of admission of guilt fines optional and not mandatory.

Payment of a fine to an issuing officer is an unequivocal admission of guilt. In fact, it is equivalent to entering a plea of guilty in an open court. An admission of guilt form, which is commonly referred to by lay persons as a "ticket" has a bold warning on its face. It advises suspects not to deposit fines or sign the document if one is not admitting to the offence.

If one opts not to pay a fine, he or she must appear in court on the day indicated on the form to challenge the so-called ticket. The danger the driving public face is that if they challenge the issuing officer by refusing to pay a fine, they will be threatened with detention or may actually be detained. Thus, most individuals end up coughing up fines that they might at law not be entitled to pay merely to avoid the inconvenience of incarceration.

The police now call these spontaneous deposit fines "spot fines". However, this writer is not aware of any law that provides for "spot fines". This unlawful procedure is an invention of the police that no one has dared to challenge for fear of reprisals through the common arbitrary deprivation of liberty. The habit of making offenders pay spot fines is highly malicious, a show of heavy-handedness and a dangerous abuse of power. It appears to be a well orchestrated grand act of extortion.

It is important to observe that the tendency to pay undeserved fines makes one accumulate previous convictions because the payment of an admission of guilt fine is, by way of procedure, forwarded to a magistrate who confirms its propriety by affixing his or her signature to the form. Once the form is so signed and confirmed, it becomes a conviction.

It is not only traffic matters that have invited this abuse of the public by the police. The Miscellaneous Offences Act criminalises various nuisances like laughing, singing and begging in a public place.

Section 4 of the same Act outlaws loitering in public places for the purpose of prostitution between the hours of 6 pm and 6am. It is interesting to note that if one loiters outside the prescribed time limits, one will not be covered by the section. Consequently, a person can loiter in a public place during the day for purposes of prostitution without inviting the wrath of the law enforcement agents.

While the section might have been conceived with the right intentions, in reality, especially as it relates to general police conduct, it appears to be a law made for the members of the female gender. This is because when enforcing this provision, the police have only targeted females because generally only females are deemed to be prostitutes. Males who sustain the commercial sex industry during odd hours are rarely apprehended. What is even more baffling is the test used by the police to identify and distinguish a suspected prostitute.

Usually, police rely on attire alone, but this test is unfair and irrational because many a time, it has led to many innocent females being arrested, detained and at times unfairly convicted. This law is not only unreasonable and discriminatory against the fairer sex, but it is clearly unconstitutional and contrary to the spirit of gender equality existing in contemporary democracies. It is in the public interest that the law be repealed forthwith to avoid any further violation of women's constitutional rights.

Many women have been deprived of their liberty and have had their right to equal protection before the law violated by this superfluous and gender- insensitive section. It is high time our police force re-examined itself and adopted a firm commitment to the respect and protection of human rights.

An undisciplined force without integrity that wantonly violates people's constitutional rights drives citizens to commit acts of vengeance, anarchy and in the long term alienates itself from the people it is supposed to serve.

Vote Muza is a partner with Muza and Nyapadi Legal Practitioners. He can be contacted on muzalaw@gmail.com or Website: muzaandnyapadi.com this article is extracted from his writing in the Financial Gazette.