Steinberg Thin Blue

The Unwritten Rules Of Policing South Africa
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-1-86842-411-5
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

A country is policed only to the extent that it consents to be. When that consent is withheld, cops either negotiate or withdraw. Once they do this, however, they are no longer police; their role becomes something far murkier. Several months before they exploded into xenophobic violence, Jonny Steinberg travelled the streets of Alexandra, Reiger Park and other Johannesburg townships with police patrols. His mission was to discover the unwritten rules of engagement emerging between South Africa's citizens and its new police force. In this provocative new book, Steinberg argues that policing in crowded urban space is like theatre. Only here, the audience writes the script, and if the police don't perform the right lines, the spectators throw them off the stage. In vivid and eloquent prose, Steinberg takes us into the heart of this drama, and picks apart the rules South Africans have established for the policing of their communities. What emerges is a lucid and original account of a much larger matter: the relationship between ordinary South Africans and the government they have elected to rule them. The government and its people are like scorned lovers, Steinberg argues: their relationship, brittle, moody, untrusting and ultimately very needy.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Steinberg, Jonny

Leseproben

The bluff
Another weekend night patrol, this one three years after Constables K and N’s debacle, and about 45 kilometres northeast of Toekomsrus. I am in Alexandra township in northern Johannesburg, among the oldest black residential spaces on the Reef, and undoubtedly the most densely populated. The police officers along with whom I am riding this evening are Inspector L and Sergeant Z. Both have been working in Alexandra for more than 15 years. They have before them a patrol plan. Hour by hour, it tells them what they should be doing from the moment they hit the streets at 7 pm until they knock off at seven the following morning. The plan was generated by Alexandra police station’s Crime Information and Analysis Centre, which is equipped with some of the finest crime-mapping software available anywhere in the world. Each day, it imbibes a great batch of data detailing every crime reported in Alexandra in the last 24 hours, and every afternoon it spews out the station’s patrol plans based on its analysis of the current distribution of crime. The police can do wonderful things with the sort of software they have in Alexandra. One can, for instance, feed the computer a simple epidemiological description of all 89 murders committed in Alex over the preceding year, and the computer will produce an extraordinary analysis for you. It will tell you how murder is distributed between informal settlements, hostels and formal housing; between lit areas and unlit areas; indoors and out; before midnight and after midnight; in summer and in winter, around Christmas and during Easter; whether murders predominate in the vicinity of shebeens, and if so in shebeens where Zimbabweans drink or where South Africans drink; whether in neighbourhoods near the highway or near the river; in areas inhabited predominantly by old Alex families or by newcomers. If you know Alex well and you study the data for ten or fifteen minutes, you will have a pretty sound knowledge of the most important situational triggers of violent death in your jurisdiction. Tonight the software has been used to shape Inspector L and Sergeant Z’s patrol plan, and they treat it as sacrosanct. They pore over it for some time, make copies of it, file some of the copies, and slip others into their notebooks. They give me a copy, explain that it is a map of what we are going to be doing for the next 12 hours, and advise that I study it. It says that between 19h15 and 21h00, Inspector L and Sergeant Z will conduct vehicle patrols in Sectors One and Two of the Alex police jurisdiction; between 21h00 and 23h00 they will join other patrols to do a cordon-and-search operation at Ghanda Centre and the old Council Building, searching in particular for stolen goods, firearms and drugs; between 23h00 and 01h00, they will stop and search pedestrians for firearms and stolen goods between London and Rooth Roads; between 01h00 and 03h00 they will visit Millie’s Tavern and Pat’s Tavern on the East Bank, as well as Alex Club and Capert House on First Avenue, to enforce the regulation that drinking establishments close at 01h00. ‘Do you stick to this plan religiously?’ I ask Inspector L. ‘Not quite,’ he replies. ‘We get a lot of domestic violence calls on a Friday night, and we must respond to them. But when we are not responding to calls, we stick with the plan.’ We do not stick with the plan. Our movement over the course of the night follows a tight, easily discernable logic, but it has nothing to do with what the computer has generated. Inspector L and Sergeant Z know that very well from the start. Perhaps it is the expense of the software and the many people employed to service it, or perhaps it is because the station commander has decreed that this is how the software ought to be used: but the respect the two officers show towards their plan is as austere and as complete as its irrelevance to the way they spend their evening. From the perspective of Inspector L and Sergeant Z’s patrol, the two most important features of Alexandra are that on a Friday evening the streets are very, very crowded, and that most residents go to bed early. Alex occupies some ten square kilometres of northeastern Johannesburg. Nobody knows its precise population: there is enormous demand for space in Alex among the urban poor, and its numbers grow a little every day. The last census, conducted in 2001, put the figure at about 340 000. That’s 34 square metres of ground space per resident: not a lot in which to move around. The widest stretches of public space are the streets, and it is the streets people use whenever an event or a ceremony brings together a crowd. Funeral tents are erected across public roads, and so the death of a resident turns thoroughfares into cul-de-sacs, diverting the township’s traffic. Partygoers often block off a section of the street with bricks and broken bottles, assemble their speakers on the edge of the pavement, and turn a ten-metre stretch of road into a dance floor. If the computer had generated a plan that corresponded to the actual imperatives of Inspector L and Sergeant Z’s patrol, it would have begun thus: 19h00-00h00, avoid crowds. In Toekomsrus, that meant skirting two well-known landmarks. In Alex on a Friday night, it is not that easy. One cannot anticipate where the crowds are, and one is given little warning before one finds oneself in the thick of one. Driving through a shack settlement of Mozambican immigrants at about 8 pm, we turn a corner to find that we are facing a group of 100-odd people. They are standing in wide, lopsided circles in the road, most of them clutching bottles of beer. From the speakers that they have mounted on a nearby roof, bass-heavy house music slams into the tin walls of the shacks and rebounds back into the street. We slow down, edge gently into the front of the crowd, then stop. The police officers’ dilemma is this: drinking on the street is illegal, and, by rights, those holding bottles of beer should be arrested. In South Africa’s townships, enforcing the law against drinking in public is deemed very important. Alcohol consumption breeds a raft of different crimes, from street fighting, to mugging, to violent domestic disputes. Both the perpetrators and victims of murder are in most cases under the influence of alcohol. Restricting the time and place of its consumption is the very spine of weekend crime prevention. Yet here and now, trying to make an arrest isn’t an advisable course of action for Inspector L and Sergeant Z. The crowd would never permit any of their number to be taken from them and thrown into the back of a police van. And yet driving on, heads down, as if the people around are not breaking the law: that is so transparent a display of their impotence that Inspector L and Sergeant Z will not countenance it. And so each gets out of the vehicle, finds a man holding a beer bottle, gently wrests it from his hands, pours its contents into the street, and puts the empty bottle down at the side of the road. The two men who have been chosen for this treatment watch impassively. Those around them fall silent and stare with cold and expressionless eyes. Most sip every now and again at their own beers. Inspector L and Sergeant Z appear to know better than to try the same with anyone else. Two lost beers are as much as this crowd will tolerate. The officers make their way back to their patrol van and drive off. A few minutes later, the Mozambicans now some distance behind us, Inspector L catches my eye in his rear-view mirror. In the moment our eyes lock, he finds the humiliation he is feeling in my gaze. ‘There are many of them,’ he volunteers unhappily. ‘You try to take them in for a small crime like drinking, and you create a lot of trouble. A lot of trouble for such a small crime.’ That much is certain. Less clear is what has just happened. The officers did what they did to salvage some dignity. The crowd humoured them; they were prepared to watch two bottles of beer seep into the ground so that the police officers could go through the motions of saving face. Why was the crowd prepared to do that? A simple cost-benefit calculation, no doubt. If you beat up two cops, the police must retaliate. The following evening they will throw a cordon around the shacks and descend upon the Mozambicans in large numbers, backed by air support and a phalanx of vans waiting to be filled with arrestees. Two lost bottles of beer is not worth that. But why not? If the police know that pouring two bottles of beer into the street comes at the cost of two injured officers and an airborne operation, they will surely stop emptying beer into the streets. Of the two sides to this relationship, the police and the Mozambican community, it is the Mozambicans who ultimately decide to what extent they are policed. Here and now, they will lose two bottles of beer to the street, but not two people to the police station cells, in order to assist to recoup some of Inspector L’s dwindling self-respect. That is today’s threshold; no doubt it wobbles and shifts: the unwritten rules are drafted and redrafted. * About an hour later, I watch a re-enactment of the same drama: Inspector L and Sergeant Z pretending to police, the young men of Alex pretending to be policed. We are in the heart of old Alex, driving away from a complaint. About us, the people on the pavements are moving, some briskly with heads down, others at leisure. Nobody is alone. Some walk in pairs, others in groups as large as half a dozen. Three young men are standing in a circle on the pavement. As we pass, one of them slips a knife into the back of his trousers. It is poor timing: had he done that a moment sooner or later, we...