by Chris McMichael, Think Africa Press
The violent reputation of South African law enforcement is
well earned: from the 34 miners shot dead by police at the Marikana mine last
August to the death of Andries Tatane – footage of whose fate at the hands
police at a protest drew public outrage in 2011 – to many beatings and
humiliations which are never reported. It is little wonder then that some feel
South Africa’s police force is reviving aspects of its role during apartheid as
an “internal army of occupation”.
Many commentators have pointed to a disturbing process of
re-militarisation within the South African Police Service (SAPS), which is
understood to have reintroduced military ranks in 2010. The SAPS’ tactics have
received public endorsement from government officials and this
re-militarisation has occurred in parallel with a broader “securitisation of
the state”, whereby the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has attempted to
extend the power of security forces while shielding their operations from
public scrutiny.
This has received much public criticism, and a critique of
this trend has even appeared in a document from the government’s own National
Planning Commission. The report called for a strategic change, stressing that
the role of the police is to “keep the peace” and “protect communities”, rather
than to perform the military function of “seeking out, overpowering and
destroying” enemies of the state.
Keeping the peace?
Time and again in contemporary South Africa, trying to
maintain a strict distinction between policing and class warfare has often been
a matter of semantics. Put bluntly, the SAPS, along with various supporting
forces organised at the metropolitan level, is central to upholding and
enforcing a skewed socio-economic order through force and intimidation. This is
not just a product of recent policy shifts but is one of the very premises of
the service’s constitutional mandate of “maintaining public order”.
The most visible expression of this has been the SAPS’
response to community and worker protests. These demonstrations, which often
occur because formal efforts to communicate grievances to authorities have
failed, are undoubtedly reflections of a wider malaise in South African
society. Throughout the country, the police have been at the frontline of
containing and sometimes even suppressing the revolts and movements which, in
the words of the Mail & Guardian, express “the basic demands of the poor –
as well as their larger, emancipatory aspirations”. This has ranged from overt
violence, such as the killing of Andries Tatane, to using the threat of state
terror – for instance in the case of a police official allegedly telling the
organisers of a march against SAPS brutality that if it went ahead, “there
would be another Marikana”.
Rather than being the exclusive product of poor crowd
management skills, this phenomenon bears all the hallmarks of a strategy
designed to suppress grassroots political mobilisation. When protests have been
accompanied by acts such as the blockading of roads or the destruction of
municipal property, the police use them as a pretext for escalated
counter-force. With ready access to armoured vehicles and helicopters, and
tactical reliance on potentially lethal rubber bullets to disperse crowds, the
SAPS are highly effective in seeking out and overpowering potential challenges
to the status quo.
Serving capital
However, police power is not just deployed in aid of the
government. Much of the media commentary portrays state violence as emerging
from ‘political meddling’ in the police by the ANC. This may be true, but
ignores how repression also serves powerful interests.
In particular, the suppression of strikes and demonstrations
arising from labour issues is good for big business; it disciplines the
workforce and ensures a stable climate. Police interventions which fall under
the remit of protecting order also ensure that conflicts arising from low pay
and other economic arrangements deemed to be unfair can be presented as
security issues.
The recent heavy police presence in response to wildcat
farmworker strikes in the Western Cape, for example, ensured that areas of
importance to the wine and tourism industries were quickly pacified, at least
temporarily. The collaborative nature of the relationship between the police
and business was also clearly evidenced in the Marikana shootings, where the
deployment of special SAPS units was aided by surveillance footage provided by
the Lonmin Company which owns the mine.
However, police oppression is not just about securing the
interests of specific businesses but is central to the wider maintenance of the
distribution of property and power. This role is exemplified in the swift and
draconian clampdowns on occupations of unused land by the urban poor. The City
of Cape Town’s Anti-Land Invasion Unit (the largest and best funded law
enforcement entity in the city), for example, has repeatedly and violently
evicted occupiers; one instance saw the deployment of 21 vehicles containing
police officers and labourers to demolish a single structure. Such
disproportionate responses serve to demonstrate and warn citizen-subjects of the
outcome of attempting to challenge the structures of land ownership.
These are just some examples of how policing is central to
both the rule of the state and the market. The point is not that all individual
police officers are brutal thugs or that it is useless to protest against the
growing authoritarianism. However, by focusing on simply rolling back
“militarisation” or “securitisation”, we may lose sight of how the police are a
central mechanism in enforcing a social model still based on domination, hierarchy
and exclusion.
