Chris McMichael, Open Democracy
With allegations ranging from torture of suspects to
involvement in extrajudicial executions, endemic violence has increasingly
characterised the reputation of the national South African Police Service
(SAPS), and the various supporting Metropolitan departments organised at the
city level. A noted hardening of police attitudes towards the citizenry has
been typified by an intensification of the force used against demonstrations,
which in many cases has included fatal shootings by officers.
This normalisation of police shootings as a tactic reached
its grim nadir on 16 August 2012 when, during a strike at Lonmin’s Marikana
mine, 34 miners were gunned down by a special SAPS unit. This police violence
is often politically targeted, with groups that attempt to organise outside of
the ANC and state structures, such as the shack dwellers movement Abahalali
baseMjondolo and the strike committee at Marikana, being particularly open to
attack.
These police actions do not occur in a vacuum. As one of the
most unequal and socially fragmented societies in the world, post-apartheid
South Africa is intensely spatially and politically exclusionary, as recently
argued by Richard Pithouse elsewhere on openDemocracy. While visible and
visceral, police violence is part of a wider continuum of governmental
strategies to manage and contain this social inequality, and protests of the
poor against it.
Fighting crime?
Despite the central role of the police in defending
authoritarian and exploitative societal relations, the media and academic
debate on their function in contemporary South Africa has skewed towards the
idea that police violence is an aberration which distracts from the
institutions true role of ‘combatting crime’.
This line is particularly reiterated by the influential
Institute for Security Studies, whose researchers are invariably cited in media
reports, maintaining that the police have been lead astray by bad policies and
that ‘professionalization’ can arrest these developments. Underpinning this is
the unquestioned belief that the police are a positive institution in society,
whose natural function is to protect the people from crime and harm.
Certainly, high levels of both violent and non-violent crime
and a generalised sense of insecurity throughout South African society means
the police are often relied upon by the public. However, it is also clear that
this is not just perceived to be a law enforcement matter, with government
surveys of victims of crime revealing that a majority of interviewed households
feel that “social and/or economic development” is “the most effective way of
reducing crime and that this should be the focus area for money to be spent
on”.
Simultaneously violent crime is spatially concentrated in
the poorer parts of the country, a direct product of the living legacy of
apartheid's ghettoization and segregation. As journalist Jared Sacks recently
observed, rather than the constant government rhetoric of flooding the streets
with more police "Dismantling the apartheid city must be the first step in
any real crime fighting initiative”.
Indeed we can go further and suggest that the police
institution has historically been central in the shaping of such spatial and
social division under apartheid rule and that, despite significant differences
in mandates and operations, the post-apartheid service is central to the
maintenance of inequality and division in present-day South Africa. Rather than
simply responding to the consequences of social inequality and serving as the
repressive arm of the state, although these roles clearly are central, the
police are also constantly engaged in what Mark Neocleous calls the
“fabrication” and building of social order
Policing Apartheid, creating division
Prior to the foundation of the national South African Police
in 1913, the European colonies which became South Africa were patrolled by a
variety of policing bodies. Ranging from Boer commandos to mounted units
established by the British these institutions were, as noted by the historian
Michael Brogden, primarily military in orientation, acting to ensure white
dominance against “the indigenous population and against non-white migrant
labour”.
Even by colonial standards this entailed exceptional degrees
of violence and coercion. As Brogden argues, by the emergence of the South
African Police “in no other British dominion…was policing so nakedly an agency
of one particular” group “against its opponents”. Along with the racial
oppression of African, Indian and 'Coloured' (mixed race) labour in the
bourgeoning cities and towns, state forces also entrenched class domination
over the white work force with a series of ferocious police and military
clampdowns on strikers in the early decades of the 20th Century. The police
were at the centre of a much wider apparatus of legal and spatial controls,
such as prison camp like worker compounds, townships and fenced locations.
Along with brute force, the police were also agents of wider efforts to install
a moral order patterned after the vision of the ruling class. For instance, the
police archives of Johannesburg in the 1910’s include officers bemoaning
“loafing and passless natives” avoiding incorporation into the labour pool,
unrest by white miners and the presence of potentially subversive immigrants
from Europe.
Apart from enforcing segregation this highlights how the
police had a major role within the everyday consolidation of capitalism in
South Africa. And while extreme, developments within South Africa took place
against an international context of elites experimenting with new forms of
“spatial militarism” aimed at controlling the threats posed by urban
proletariats and colonial populations.
As colonial segregation consolidated into official
Apartheid, the police become ever more brutal and powerful. Under the 40 year
rule of the National Party the police presided over a dual system: while the
white minority experienced civilian policing, the primary goal of policing over
the black population was to prevent political resistance, which the state
attempted to achieve through the routinizing of torture, murder and terror. The
police were also central to the daily administration of Apartheid through the
enforcement of pass laws and curfews. An indication of how deeply the police
force penetrated into the daily lives of black people is given within the text
of the 1955 Freedom Charter which called for a non-racial democratic society in
which “The privacy of the house from police raids shall be protected by law”.
Post-apartheid policing: the 'war on crime'
As a result of this legacy, government policy towards the
police after the first free elections focused on overhauling the institution
from a ‘force’ to a ‘service’. Official rhetoric placed a focus on ‘community’
policing. However, high crime rates and government desire to seem proactive on
this meant that by the late 1990’s this type of reform had been superseded by a
focus on the ‘war on crime’. In operational practice this meant a resurgence of
highly visible clampdowns on ‘problem’ areas, often echoing the military-style
deployments which were the operational modus operandi of the Apartheid-era
police force.
The ‘war on crime’ has become a permanent feature of
post-apartheid policing, with officials citing the dangers of officer’s jobs
and a desire by the public to feel safe as the main drivers for the
entrenchment of this open-ended conflict. According to the SAPS code of conduct
the key point of such a war is to ensure “a safe and secure environment for all
people in South Africa”. This would appear to be a reasonable sentiment.
However, as Gullierma Seri argues, the seemingly neutral, consensual language
of security serves a political role in offering an apparent solution to the
puzzle of how to make an “unequal and
fragmented society…governable without calling such fragmentation and inequality
into question.” Technocratic security policies are presented as 'solutions' to
much deeper social problems.
Ensuring security for world class investment
In the case of South Africa, the official image of security
relayed by the government, big business and the media is based on a social
order in which the issue of inequality and fragmentation can ultimately be
solved at some indefinite point in the future - but only if economic growth can
be maintained unimpeded in the present. The underlying premise of this is that
while the poor majority may be reasonable in expecting basic services from the
government they should be quiescent while waiting for benefits to trickle down
from the top of the economy.
This ideology is clearly expressed at a conceptual level in
the variety of safety and security documents produced both by the police and
other governmental institutions, which pivot around the creation of ‘world
class’ environments for investment, work and consumption. A sterling example is
provided in the recent National Development Plan which, while criticising
police violence, maintains that "When communities do not feel safe and
live in fear, the country’s economic development and the people’s wellbeing are
affected, hindering their ability to achieve their potential”. The possibility
of life having value outside of serving the economy or the nation is precluded.
The highly economistic vision of safety and order that
characterises contemporary South Africa has direct operational impacts on the
role of the police. The focus on creating productivity means that intensified
police operations are constantly deployed to regulate and remake space as part
of their broadly defined crime fighting mandate. This can range from regular
by-law enforcement against street traders to participation in housing evictions
and the forced removal of occupations of unused land by the poor. A noticeable
factor of municipal policing in the last few years has been the creation of
well-funded ‘anti-land invasion units’
in various cities.
These crime and order enforcement measures often rapidly
blur into political repression in the police operations conducted in poor black
areas. This is most evident in the aggressive, and many times fatal, crowd
control tactics used at local protests which take place throughout the country,
as grievances with government turn into small scale revolts and confrontations
with the authorities. The stock response of police officials is to claim that
by adopting tactics such as blockading roads, protesters have exceeded their
democratic rights and veered into “criminality”. Most recently this has been
used to justify the fatal shooting of 17 year old Nqobile Nzuza in Durban,
which occurred during efforts by local government to evict shack dwellers from
Cato Crest.
Time and time again, the state will overplay the ‘violence’
used by protesters while systematically minimising the far more severe violence
used by its agents. In the case of the Marikana killings, evidence continues to
emerge which indicates that the SAPS intended to use lethal force from the
outset, and then attempted to disseminate the claim that their lines were
stormed by miners. Such portrayals of the forces of order versus 'the mob'
resonates with a wider media and political discourse which regards ‘wild cat’
labour strikes and community militancy as a threat to stability and economic
growth, often represented by hyperbolic fears about mass unemployment leading
to social chaos. Even in its more progressive variations this reduces the issue
of policing to a question of how the service can better manage crowds.
This seems to spectacularly miss the point: the fact that
citizens are constantly engaged in standoffs with the state is not a ‘security’
issue but rather a challenge to a socio-economic structure that continues to
reproduce poverty and exclusion. In repressing these challenges, the police
function to maintain this status quo of extreme inequality, a status quo which
historically they have played a central role in building.
Maintaining order
Throughout South African history the police have been the
primary muscle for both government and bosses. Certainly the contemporary SAPS
is not the same entity as its totalitarian predecessor, and ordinary people at
least have legal protection against state violence in the post-Apartheid
period, though this is often more in theory than application. However, in the
name of security and combatting crime, entrenched state violence and coercion
have been rehabilitated under a new veneer. Indeed we should not take the
police at its word that “crime” is in fact their primary focus. Rather, the
“war on crime” is part of a much wider project of maintaining a social order
riddled with spatial, social and economic inequality.
The discourse of fighting crime serves a central political
role in legitimating violence and coercion that is deployed to protect property
and power, rather than to protect the public from violent crime. Police
repression does not occur in an institutional vacuum but is directed towards
the maintence of a divided and unequal society, with its exploitative economic
relations and a political elite eager to maintain order by criminalising social
unrest. The police are central to this wider totality of domination in
contemporary South Africa- far from being a neutral institution they are a key
weapon of the state, serving as the frontline soldiers of an on-going social
war.
