Thin Blue

The Unwritten Rules Of Policing South Africa

Jonny Steinberg

• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781868423033
• eBook ISBN:
  9781868424115
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Refuge

The great exception to the general story I have been telling is the policing of people in their own homes. Out on the street, especially where public space is crowded, South Africans have not given their full consent to being policed, not by the police force they have, at any rate. Yet behind the closed doors of the nation’s private homes, demand for the presence of police is abundant, a cascade that begins to fall upon dispatch centres every Friday evening, and does not cease until late on Sunday night.

On the streets, the young uniformed officer is a skittish figure who must beware the living and tread lightly upon the dead. He steps into a house or a shack, and his fear vanishes: he is a patriarch’s patriarch, commander of the elderly and the little ones alike.

From where does this authority come? Looking for its roots in the past seems counterintuitive at first blush, since the very spectacle of domestic policing is entirely new. Everyday life was not policed under white minority rule; cops did not go into black people’s homes to stop a man from beating a woman, let alone to arrest him for it. And it was unusual in the extreme for women to call the police to protect them. The very notion of anybody – a neighbour, a relative, or a cop – storming a township house and dragging a man away from those he is hurting, has little pedigree.

So how are we to explain what domestic policing has become? I suspect that it is borrowed from the old after all. Cops may not have entered township homes to keep the peace in the past, but they certainly did come in the middle of the night, to search for pass offenders, mainly, and nobody who lived in a township back then has forgotten the sight of people being dragged from their homes. Here and now, watching two police officers walk into a house to which they have been called, grab a man by the scruff of the neck and throw him into the back of a van, is to recall Mtutuzeli Matshoba’s blackjacks, who knocked on the door at one in the morning, sending grown men and women scurrying for their passbooks.

There is a sense in which the blackjacks of old are kept breathing both by township men and by township women. Men because it remains in their pedigree to submit to uniformed officers who enter their homes; women because they have sensed this atavistic fear in their men and have fashioned it into an ally. They have rekindled apartheid’s nastiest instrument and turned it upon the intimates who hurt them.

If this is the case, there is some irony here. It is the Domestic Violence Act of 1998, among the most distinctively post-apartheid pieces of legislation written since 1994, that obliges the police to respond energetically to women’s calls.

While most self-respecting police officers would deny it, they gravitate towards domestic conflict. Some of them might treat the women who come to them badly, imposing careless and destructive solutions upon the problems they are called to solve, but the domestic sphere has become their natural home. It feels good to be there. It is a refuge from the streets in which they are put upon, insulted, and threatened. It is the one sphere in which their authority is rarely questioned; they are there because their presence has been demanded. And it feels good because it is the only part of their work that allows them to express themselves as moral agents, after a fashion.

And yet they are also right when they insist that they hate it. It is hollow work, and they know it, and much of what they do in private homes is an attempt to fill up the hollowness with whatever comes to hand.

*

Recall a moment from some time back. We are in Alexandra on a Friday night with two officers, Inspector L and Sergeant Z. It is around 1.30 am, the streets are emptying, and we come across a lovely scene: two lovers are embracing under the cover provided by an enormous winter coat. Inspector L spits venom at them and chases them off the street. He is getting empty revenge for the night he has had. He and his partner have spent much of their time dodging crowds. Sometimes they failed and were forced to police before an audience: like when they encountered Mozambicans drinking beer in the street, and when they saw a young man slipping a knife into his trousers. On both occasions, they were forced to obey an opaque set of rules laid down by the people on the streets, rules designed primarily to cushion their humiliation. Just two officers on a Friday night in Alex: they were cowed.

About half an hour has passed since the lovers in the coat-tent were sent home. We are in the heart of old Alex. The crowds on the street have thinned considerably, but there are still people about. Among them we see a woman and a small child. She is in her mid-thirties, perhaps, he no more than three or four years old. She clutches his hand tightly; she is moving with purpose.

Inspector L sits up in his seat and arcs his body towards them. When he speaks, there is in his voice a hectoring rage.

‘Child abuse!’ he shouts. ‘This is nothing but child abuse! What is she doing on the streets with such a young child at this hour?’

He rolls down his window and asks her threateningly what she is doing, where she is going. I am thinking that this is to be a replay of the scene with the lovers and the coat, only far uglier; Inspector L intends to spend what remains of his shift seeking redress for his humiliation from the good-humoured and the weak.

When the woman begins speaking it is clear that she is deeply upset. Her voice falters, and the sides of her eyes grow moist. Her lips are tense; she is making a bold effort not to burst into tears.

She tells the officers that she is fleeing her boyfriend. He began drinking at four this afternoon, she says, and he started beating her at nine. She knows from bitter experience that he will not stop until he sleeps, and she has fled. She has taken the child because a small boy ought not to be left alone with a drunk man. Better to risk leading him by the hand through the streets. She is en route to a cousin, she says, about some ten blocks from here.

Inspector L invites her into the car, and we begin to drive. He asks her for the address of the place of refuge she has chosen, and then for her boyfriend’s address. He consults briefly with his partner, and then we head, not for the refuge, but for the boyfriend. Inspector L has in his sights the most legitimate object for his anger he is likely to find this evening, and he wishes to have it out.

The woman directs us to an address down near the river, walks us into an old Alex yard, and points to a shack. The sound of reggae comes from it: bass-heavy, mellow and loud. One of the inspectors knocks and a man opens the door, bringing with him a welcome gust of warm air and the sweet-sour smell of ganja. He peers at the woman, then at one officer, then the other, then at me. His face breaks into a smile. He is amused. He invites us in.

There is a bed, and a plasma TV with a gigantic screen that consumes one of the shack’s four walls. There is an equally large silver stereo resting on a shelf that is suspended from the ceiling by four chains. There is also a stove, the four plates of which are all lit up; the warmth of this place sinks immediately into my cheeks and my toes. The man himself is enormous, well over six feet tall, long-limbed and broad, and he moves about in his largeness with great ease.

Inspector L begins to shout at him, but the reggae comfortably swallows his voice. Beside himself with irritation, he orders for the music to cease. The man crosses his tiny room at leisure and cuts the sound. Inspector L’s bark is alone now, and it echoes jarringly through the shack. He throws scorn at the man’s very being: ‘A woman and child alone on these streets after midnight! What sort of man are you! How can it be safer for them out there than in here! You are disgusting!’

The woman listens quietly to Inspector L’s invective and, as she does so, the expression on her face grows bolder and angrier. When Inspector L breaks for a pause she steps in and takes his place. She moves up close to the big man and begins to scream, her spit spraying the side of his cheek. He raises an eyebrow – a lazy acknowledgment that this is an unusual situation, a woman screaming at him for all her worth, and he powerless to shut her up – and then he turns away from her.

Once she has started, it is clear that she is not going to stop. A dam wall has burst, releasing more bile and distress and disappointment than she probably knew she possessed. As I watch her, the contours of the alliance that has formed between her and Inspector L dimly emerge. They are borrowing from one another, I believe; she his uniform and the threat of his gun, and he her victimhood.

Inspector L has sought this scene. He was not called here. He did not need to stop the woman on the street. And once he invited her into the car, he did not need to bring her here. He is in this shack because he needs this confrontation. What is it that he needs from it? What has brought him here?

I have no doubt that he would deny it vociferously if I put it to him, but he is here because he identifies with this woman. The entire night he has been put upon by crowds of people who can easily hurt him, crowds by whose rules he must play if he is not to be beaten, crowds that have been emasculating him here in this township for the last 15 years. He is in search of somebody big and menacing who he can shake and shout at and turn upon until he has managed to sweat some of the humiliation out of his pores.

As for the woman, she did not invite Inspector L to this shack; she has had no part in setting up this scene. But once he is here, she scents the nature of their alliance, and she warms to it. With two armed and uniformed men in the room, men who are on her side, she is suddenly drawn into this moment. For as long as their presence lasts, the big man cannot lay a finger on her. He is disarmed. And in this unlikely pause between his past and future violence, she can conjure all the pain from the depths of her being and vomit it at him, a moment of longed-for catharsis his fists would at any other time disallow.

Perhaps this is one among the many reasons South African women demand the presence of police officers in their homes. Beyond any thoughts of the long term, beyond any consideration about what will happen tomorrow and the next day, there is deep satisfaction in the catharsis, in the sudden turning of the tables, in the brief period of freedom.

*

It is easy to miss, this edgy affinity between cops and battered women, because in the ordinary course of things, many cops treat the women who seek their help like dirt.

Early on a Friday evening, I sit in the client service centre at the police station in Reiger Park, a coloured township on the East Rand. Friday night shift is a few minutes old; behind the counter that separates cops from civilians, five or six uniformed officers are signing in.

A woman walks into the room. There is blood pouring from her nose down the sides of her mouth and onto her chin. Beneath her left eye the flesh is lumpy and swollen and is beginning to darken.

‘Ek wil ’n saak maak,’ she announces to nobody in particular.

None of the officers looks up. One of them snorts derisively, his head still down.

‘Ek wil ’n saak maak,’ she repeats. ‘Daai poes het my weer geslaan, en nou slaan hy ook die kind, en ek is nou moeg, enough is enough, hy gaan vanaand in die tronk slaap.’

‘Not if you don’t shut up,’ one of the cops grunts. ‘Shut up and wait for the van.’

‘Wanneer kom die van?’ she asks.

‘After you shut up,’ the cop replies.

One of the officers looks up long enough to notice that the woman is dripping blood onto the bench she has found. ‘Get out!’ he shouts. ‘You are making a mess in this charge office. Wait for the van outside!’

The woman ignores him entirely, as if he has been speaking to someone else. She has come here to get the police to arrest her man, a course of action she appears to have brooded over for some time, and she will not be moved. The cop who scolded her clucks his tongue and continues with his work. The other officers eye one another briefly, their glances raising a mutual enquiry: should we gang up on this bleeding woman and expel her from the room? But this fleeting, incipient alliance flickers and then dies. They are too lazy, too preoccupied: there are other things to do. One of them hands her a wad of paper towels.

*

Precisely 24 hours later, I am in the same room, and the same five or six officers are preparing for a new shift. A woman walks in. Like her counterpart from yesterday, she has been beaten, her cheeks both swollen, her left earlobe caked in dried blood. She is African. She has probably come from the large informal settlement that ends just a few hundred metres from here. Her hair is long and is tied into three large bangs that point anarchically from her head in different directions.

The officer in charge of tonight’s shift is a middle-aged woman, Inspector X. She looks up, takes in the woman’s bruises, and lowers her head again. ‘What happened, sister?’ she asks.

The woman rests her elbows on the counter, sighs heavily, and begins to tell a story in a quiet, even voice. She is speaking a mixture of native-tongue Xhosa and recently learned Zulu, and I struggle to follow her. I find that my attention is drawn to the officers in the room. They are busy with their papers, their logbooks, and their equipment, but they are all listening. More than listening, they are drawn. They are sucked in. Their facial expressions, as they go about their tasks, are those of an afternoon soap opera audience. They are involved, and it is as clear as day that these women who come one after the other into this room are quenching a great thirst.

Like a television audience, the officers can lose themselves in the lives of others. But what marks them from those glued to the silver screen is that they are players in the dramas they watch; they intervene. And so they are free to take the mess of the rest of the their working lives, the humiliation and smallness they suffer in the streets, and to refract it through the domestic scenes in which they participate. Policing violence among intimates thus becomes a cheap form of therapy. Here, in the one domain where they are in control, they have the freedom to choose roles, and thus to win back something of what they lose among the crowds outside. They can treat women like shit and thus become the ones who treat them like shit out on the streets. Or they can identify with the women who call them, grab violent men by the scruffs of their necks, and thus get revenge on the proxies of the ones who bully them.

Most of all, they can write some of the rules, an unusual freedom in their work, and they do so with relish. Riding along with two officers in Kagiso on the West Rand some time in 2004, we received a domestic violence call and found our way to a small house on the outski...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Acknowledgments
• Two incidents, juxtaposed
• The bluff
• Captain R
• To Newclare and back
• Mtutu
• Police as allergy
• Constable T and the impossible suburbs
• Grilled chicken, boiled rice
• Refuge
• Sibanda of the suburbs
• References
• Further reading
• Copyright