Service delivery protest in Khayelitsha
GOOD COP, BAD COP: Confessions of a Reluctant Policeman,
by Andrew Brown (Random House)
The Marikana massacre was the result of a policing system that has not changed in any significant way since. The police can not indefinitely keep the lid on angry community protests. Militarisation may not have been the biggest mistake ever made in modern South African policing policy, but only because the police also disbanded specialised units that dealt with specific issues. You can’t fix domestic violence with guns.
Andrew Brown is not the first to say any of these things; his analysis of the police’s many, many problems covers ground well trod by any number of academics and experts of one kind or another.
Brown, though, has two major advantages over his predecessors. One, he writes in entertaining fashion. Two, he is willing to bleed to implement the necessary changes – and stands a far better than average chance of doing just that.
“Social workers,” he says. “It’s a no-brainer.”
The question: which should get budget priority, social workers in the communities where you work or bullet-proof vests for you and your comrades?
If his safety as a police reservist must be placed in even greater jeopardy due to a lack of equipment and resources, Brown believes, so that money can be put towards fixing the socio-economic issues tearing communities apart, then so be it. If the police van he drives at night has to do another 320 000 kilometres before it is replaced, fine. Because more policing is not the answer.
“I don’t want to live in a country that has a policeman on every corner,” he says. “That’s not the way. It is also not going to take a whole lot of the crime away.”
Voting for the EFF, on the other hand, just might.
Brown’s second non-fiction book launched this week. Good Cop, Bad Cop: Confessions of a Reluctant Policeman is episodic rather than documentary. It is also, he confesses freely, a form of therapy. After nearly two decades as a police reservist dealing with rape and murder, danger and death, being unable to explain to his family why he does it and unable to explain to friends what he experiences on the streets when they are asleep at night, some therapy was needed.
But because it is so personal rather than rigorous it is all the easier to spot the point where Brown lost his faith in politics as usual.
In 2015 the tyres burned again in the Western Cape township of Masiphumelele. Among the many government services the protesters demanded was better policing. The government listened, or so it seemed.
“Naivety,” as Brown writes, “is a rather pathetic quality. Especially for those who should know better.”
Brown was among the many police deployed on the day Masiphumelele was to receive its very own satellite police station. And that technically happened, with the successful handover of a mobile command post. But the way in which it was done flabbergasted Brown.
“It was all about politics,” he writes. “It was the ANC jockeying for favour against the DA; it was the deputy minister showing the country that she cared; it was senior police brass trying to persuade their keepers that they were responding to the community’s needs. It was a choreographed pantomime complete with expensive props and shiny uniforms.”
Brown assiduously fails to name the deputy minister who handed over the command post without ever setting foot in the township. We know she is of “flabby fist”, that when she crossed road she “waddled”, and that she “oozed” when she emerged from the embrace of a luxury car.
But Brown does not give her a name. Not, his book suggests, because it makes him less likely to be sued should the deputy minister feel so inclined. Nor because it will make him less likely to be run out of the police service for breaking the rules written and unwritten regarding omert&arave;.
He does not name her, it seems, because she is only a avatar of a system gone horribly wrong, wrong enough to shake him to his core.
“This is the first election I didn’t vote ANC,” Brown said this week. “I nearly wept, but I didn’t. I voted for the EFF.”
His vote – for a party he likes because “it is in the government’s face” – is not purely because of his experiences of the police, Brown says. Yet it is clear that the police has for a long time defined how he looks at politics. And though he shies away from saying it so bluntly, Brown describes a police force he sees being pushed back into apartheid ways.
Andrew Brown. (Delwyn Verasamy, M&G)
At the age of 19, Brown recounts in his book, he found himself in detention as a collaborator of the struggle forces with the hope that he could be turned to testify against others. One of his interrogators explained that the police just needed to keep the rebellious black people under control until a political solution could be found. Even that policeman, Brown writes, for whom he had little respect, could tell that “the police were there as a holding action, not a solution”.
“You can’t expect the police to become again your armed wing keeping a discontented populace under control,” Brown says. “That’s a recipe for disaster.”
This, though, is exactly what he believes is happening. And instead of recognising the ultimate futility of policing as a solution, more money is thrown into policing, not only for crowd control but also to deal with crimes of economic desperation and domestic violence.
“Don’t ask me, as a policeman, to come and change the dreadful way men relate to women in this country,” Brown says. “There have to be other programmes to do that.”
The sense of betrayal he feels at the failure of the government to realise that simple truth strikes deep. He became a police reservist in 1999 because the struggle was over and he needed a new way to contribute, Brown says, and because the police so clearly needed to be transformed. What needs transforming now is government.
“Our government – the African National Congress for which I was once prepared to sacrifice my life – has failed spectacularly to adhere to its obligations under the Freedom Charter and the Constitution,” Brown writes in one of the few overtly analytical sections of his book. “Our country has become a pressure cooker as a result of government’s non-delivery.”
Brown’s solution to policing’s problems echo those of the many academics that have considered the issue: take the politics out, bring the humanity back in, de-escalate and reprioritise. Unlike the experts, though, he can speak to the fruits of implementing it, such as the time he left his shotgun behind to walk the streets of Masiphumelele, and became a sort of human crane for the delivery of small children over the fence of a playground.
“Wherever I walked, I was trailed by young children, all chattering and calling to me,” he writes about foot patrols in the township where police and protesters had done battle shortly before.
“There are times when you just need to get out of your police van, get out of your Nyala [armoured vehicle], and go and do the job of the police officer,” he said this week.
Still, even Brown admits it is not as easy as putting down the guns and basking in the trust of a community. Intellectually he recognises the political problems involved, the practical complications, the many steps required, the long road still ahead in transforming a police force into a police service, the 1994 change in name from the latter to the former notwithstanding.
His subconscious, though, is clamouring for change, immediate change, before things go horribly wrong.
He has a recurring dream, Brown writes in the epilogue to Good Cop, Bad Cop, in which the police confront a furious crowd. He is part of the police line. He is holding a rifle with the safety off, finger on the trigger. He is waiting for a command he knows must come. Then he steps out of line, sheds his gear, turns around, and faces his former comrades.
“I put my hands in the air, as high as I can, and brace for impact,” Brown writes of his dream.
“Ja, sometime I am terrified,” Brown says. “Sometimes I don’t understand how everyone else is not terrified too.”