Jane Duncan, Mail & Guardian
In his budget speech last month, Police Minister Nathi Nhleko
promised to demilitarise the police, as proposed by the National Development
Plan, improve the police’s crowd control skills and equip them with less lethal
crowd-control equipment. He made these promises to reduce police violence
against protests, which had led to several protester deaths.
These initiatives are much needed, but are they enough to
arrest the authoritarian drift in protest policing? Unfortunately not. One
reason for this is because the militarisation concept is understood very
superficially in public debate, and because the government, journalists and
many analysts have equated militarisation largely with the reintroduction of
the military ranking system to the police.
The dominant narrative suggests that the main task at hand is
to reverse the ranking system that has apparently brainwashed the police into
believing that they are a “force” rather than a “service”, and to retrain them
in more civilianised crowd control skills. In fact, the argument that police
violence is as a result of a lack of police training has been elevated to the
level of common sense.
This narrative portrays police violence as a huge mistake, an
aberration, but it masks the deliberate political decisions that have moved
South Africa towards becoming a more repressive state. These arguments are
simply too easy, too convenient.
When South Africa shifted from apartheid to democracy, the
political leadership endorsed community policing, but never really gave it an
opportunity to succeed. In fact, it is difficult not to conclude that they set
it up to fail, so they could make the case for more authoritarian policing
models that had become ascendant elsewhere, including militarised policing and
intelligence-led policing.
Much has been made of the fact that when Jackie Selebi became
police commissioner he dismantled many of the specialist policing units,
ostensibly to democratise the skills they contained.
It has been argued that this led to a loss of vital
crowd-control skills and hence an escalation of police violence against
protests. Independent Police Investigative Directorate statistics show there is
an element of truth to this, but it does not provide a complete explanation.
Tellingly, the one area of specialist policing that continued
to expand was paramilitary policing – the number of paramilitary units has
trebled over the past decade. So a skills vacuum was created in the more
civilianised sections of the police.
A superficial understanding of the militarisation concept
serves the police leadership. In fact, the militarisation problem is much more
deeply rooted that the military ranking system – and is likely to be more
intractable than is being made out.
Possibly the foremost academic on police militarisation,
Professor Peter Kraska, has defined militarisation as an ideology that stresses
the use of force and threats of violence to solve social problems, and the use
of military power as a problem-solving tool.
Based on his ethnographic work in the United States police,
Kraska developed a continuum to measure levels of police militarisation. He
identified four main indicators: material indicators (the extent of martial
weaponry), cultural indicators (the extent of martial language), organisational
indicators (the extent of martial arrangements) and operational indicators (the
extent of operational patterns modelled on the military).
Drawing on Kraska’s work, the American Civil Liberties Union
launched a campaign in 2013 to plot the extent of police militarisation in the
US. The nongovernmental organisation’s affiliates filed more than 260 public
records requests to determine the extent to which federal funding and support
has fuelled police militarisation.
There has been no similar attempt made in South Africa.
Nhleko’s speech focused on the cultural indicators of
militarisation – and to a lesser extent on material indicators. Yet there are
signs that militarisation has extended beyond these indicators. The danger of
not having quantified the extent of militarisation is that the police may
remove its superficial manifestations to appease public outrage, while leaving
intact its substance. The resulting change is likely to be merely cosmetic.
Of organisational indicators, the most obvious in the police
is the proliferation of paramilitary units. There has been no systematic
attempt to track when and why they are deployed, which should be of concern
because there are signs that their interventions are being normalised in
increasing areas of policing, including public order policing.
In Mpumalanga, for instance, the paramilitarised Tactical
Response Team appears to have acted as the provincial government’s personal
security guards to quell protests. All three paramilitary units were deployed
to Marikana, and the head of the most highly trained of the paramilitary units,
the Special Task Force, designed the operational plan for Marikana.
This unit has been trained by, among others, the US Special
Operations Command, a military unit that co-ordinates the Special Operations
Forces. These forces conduct anti-terrorism operations and have prosecuted the
US’s “war on terror”, including by way of “renditions” and extrajudicial
killings.
This means that the police unit at least partly responsible
for the single biggest act of police violence in the post-apartheid period is
also extremely skilled, exploding the myth that police violence is a result of
a lack of training. Some of the most highly trained policing units have been
among the most violent.
It could be argued that the re-establishment of the public
order police will make their deployment in protest situations less necessary.
But these police have themselves embraced a more paramilitarised model – the
French model of public order policing – which involves saturation policing of
crowds at close distances.
In the run-up to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa,
thousands of police officers were trained in this model, which has been
controversial in France for fuelling rather than de-escalating social conflicts
in French public housing estates.
The joint deployment of the military and the police are
operational indicators: civilianised police forces generally keep the military
out of policing and keep the roles of the police, military and intelligence
separate. The post-apartheid white paper on defence rejected a domestic role
for the military on the grounds that this was a hallmark of repressive regimes,
but the country’s current political leadership appears intent on reviewing this
decision. Yet no public analysis has been conducted of the frequency of these
deployments, or their necessity.
Centralisation is another indicator of militarised policing,
because it allows for greater political control to ensure rapid deployment. A
good example of how extraordinary security measures become normalised is that a
“security legacy” of the 2010 World Cup, the National Joint Intelligence and
Operations Structure (Natjoints), appears to have become a permanent feature of
the policing landscape.
This body brings together the police, the intelligence
agencies and various government departments, co-ordinating the joint deployment
of the police and the military, and has grown provincial legs as well. In an
eerie echo of the past, in September 2013, Natjoints announced that its newly
created “stability committee” was monitoring and fast-tracking prosecutions,
which suggests a more centralised approach to the protests, and an escalation
of disruptive protests to the level of priority crimes.
The establishment of these structures also suggests that the
security cluster is seeing the police, the military and the intelligence
services increasingly as one organism – or, in the words of Natjoints, “joint
security forces”. Mandate and function creep are likely to intensify, and these
roles do not appear to be converging along civilian lines.
It is, however, likely that the police leadership will rein
in the more overt forms of police violence, because the political costs are
escalating. Yet the drift towards more authoritarian policing will probably
continue. There has been little public debate about the shift towards
intelligence-led policing, with the growing power of the crime intelligence
division being its most visible manifestation.
This form of policing puts intelligence-gathering at the
heart of police work, ostensibly allowing the police to take much more
strategic decisions about where and how to deploy their resources. In his
speech, Nhleko indicated that the police will build the capacity of crime
intelligence throughout the country, noting that “its significance cannot be
overemphasised”.
Intelligence-led policing has been controversial elsewhere.
It does not stop the police from engaging in human rights abuses; it merely
makes these abuses less visible. Police work also becomes more secretive, which
is not good news for South Africans. Already, more activists are complaining
about crime intelligence interfering with legitimate advocacy.
The police are not politically neutral; policing choices are
shaped by the social forces in which they operate.
In expansionary economic periods, the capitalist system can
afford to grant the police semi-autonomy to experiment with “touchy-feely”
forms of policing such as community policing. In recessionary periods, by
contrast, the police become more visible as instruments of class power.
Marikana was the most graphic illustration of this shift.
The political tasks related to police violence are determined
by how the problem is understood. Journalists, academics and activists need to
become much more serious about documenting police authoritarianism, quantifying
militarisation and debating policing models that have been widely criticised
elsewhere; these bodies of knowledge are necessary to undertake informed
advocacy for police reforms.
