There is a growing gulf between what is important to those at the top of the police force and those at the bottom, reports Tangeni Amupadhi after two weeks at a police station
CONSTABLE Mbekeni Mthetwa died for a car. Minutes before his shift was to end on the evening of May 26, the 34-year-old officer was called out to a west Johannesburg suburb. He walked into gunfire from a Riverlea house where the suspected car thieves were hiding, and took two bullets in the head.
Sergeant Joshua Williams, a fellow officer at the General Johann Coetzee police station in Newlands, was on his way home with his wife, Ursula, when he heard on the police radio that an officer had been shot.
Against his wife’s wishes, Williams spun his car around and raced to the scene. He found three people lying on the ground with bullet wounds. One, the man whose car was stolen, was already dead. Mthetwa, his pulse weak, was dying.
Constable Mangizi Nukeri, who had accompanied Mthetwa to the original car theft incident, stood frozen in shock. “He did not even recognise me, but we have worked together for years,” Williams says.
People in the street were shouting at Nukeri to call an ambulance for the third victim. “They were threatening to assault a man who was so traumatised he could not even move,” Williams says. “They didn’t even care about the policeman who was dying.” As he drove home, Williams prayed Mthetwa would hang on, but the stricken officer did not make it to the hospital.
Williams told his shocked wife: “Every morning when I kiss you goodbye, don’t expect me to come home. Because, next time, it may be me.”
On the Monday Mthetwa died, the public eye was firmly focused on businessman Meyer Kahn. The South African Breweries chief had just been appointed chief executive of the South African Police Service – a two-year secondment widely lauded, especially by Kahn’s business peers. “Undeniably this is the most difficult job of my life,” Kahn told the Citizen newspaper.
His plan, however, was simple – to apply the same principles to police stations, like General Johann Coetzee, that he has employed in a business empire which ranges from Castle Beer to OK Bazaars.
Kahn, after meeting national police commissioner George Fivaz that Monday afternoon, added that the police needed “shock treatment to get the process going”.
The following day Williams was called to a robbery. He arrived a few moments after the robbers had shot the shop owner and fled, leaving him for dead. At that point Williams, who joined the force eight years ago, decided it was time to get out. “It is not the first time I have seen people die, but this time it got to me. I became stressed out. The image of blood flowing from the heads of other people is so sickening.”
The incident underlines what many in the police see as a growing gulf between what’s important to those at the top, and what really matters at the bottom. At the top it has recently been about Kahn’s appointment, or the continued friction between Safety and Security Minister Sydney Mufamadi and Fivaz, or the correct monthly intervals between releasing crime statistics.
At General Johann Coetzee and stations like it across the country, it’s always been about poor pay, poor prospects, racism and a public that doesn’t care. “When a policeman dies, Mufamadi and Fivaz do not send messages of condolence,” says one constable, “but they jump at the slightest opportunity to criticise us. The government treats the police as if all of us were involved in third force activities … They are all useless.”
The station is one of Gauteng’s busiest, handling more than 20 suburbs which include some of the province’s richest such as Northcliff and one of its poorest, Westbury.
Westbury is the so-called coloured township from which, people joke, Gauteng numberplates got the initials GP (gangsters’ paradise) because criminal syndicates command much of the territory.
The station’s 109 police officers serve at least 300 000 people. Five years ago, it had 300 officers. Shifts had 30 uniformed officers in previous years; they now have one-third of this number.
The task of doing more with less falls to station commander, Senior Superintendent Marius Morland. A bulky man in his late- thirties, Morland is a career policeman with an easy smile whose door is open to any of his officers.
Recently he introduced a shift arrangement which cut chronic absenteeism at the station – a problem blamed for the police’s lacklustre performance.
And while Fivaz is being rapped for not employing the services of former New York police chief William Bratton, Morland is quietly putting to work Bratton’s techniques of “zero tolerance”.
This means coming down hard on even the pettiest crimes – such as urinating in the street, which draws a public indecency charge.
Ironically, Morland believes it is the main product of Meyer Kahn’s industry that should take much of the blame for crime. So drunks are routinely thrown into the police cells to sober up in a four-hour internment.
Shebeens are also hot targets. Last weekend, officers spent eight hours pouncing on several of the region’s busiest illicit bars. Deputy station commander David Oliphant, who masterminded the raids, kept the targets to himself until the very last minute – a move mainly driven by his attempts to protect his tipsters. “Let’s go out and do pro-active policing,” Oliphant beamed. “Pick up anyone who looks like a criminal.”
Williams broke quietly away after the pep talk to pick up an R-5 rifle. These days, he doesn’t feel his side-arm alone is enough to deter criminals with AK-47s.
As darkness fell, the officers moved swiftly among their targets, apprehending bar-tenders and impounding liquor. The shebeens’ clients melted away before them, to other shebeens. The tour of the area’s shebeens ended in Bosmont, with the officers surrounding and then invading a house where patrons were playing pool, drinking and dancing. “It is not necessary to close this place,” one of the team admitted. “These people are professionals and they don’t bother anybody.”
Nevertheless, the Bosmont bust yielded up five crates of beer, and 40 bottles of whisky, rum and brandy. The owner’s wife claimed a bottle of Jack Daniels was a present for Fathers Day. She was advised to buy another.
Morland sympathises with shebeen owners who say they’re only trying to make a living. He just wants them to register and behave like legitimate businesses.
It’s midday on Saturday. Inspector Rudi van Zyl and Constable Morne Joubert are out enjoying themselves, on patrol in their white van. Their mission varies between arresting drunks, and pouncing on illegal immigrants, with an average catch of 20 a day.
Van Zyl says Morland’s station is the best he has worked in during 11 years on the job. He’s been here a month, but believes he has found a home. His other postings included the “Northern Transvaal”, the Free State and six soul-destroying months at John Vorster Square – “People don’t work together, and nobody laughs” – which almost drove him to resign. General Johann Coetzee has revived his faith in what he is doing.
He is 28, looks 17, and readily admits that he was once a “naughty boy” who has now matured. He does not, however, believe in shaving every day.
Joubert (24), has also found his dream station. He does not even entertain the thought of going back to Parkview or any of Johannesburg’s northern suburbs – Newlands has been his home for two years, and has so much more to offer than the “boring” northern suburbs.
“There you get one body in a year. Here you get two in a shift,” he grins.
Many of Van Zyl’s black and coloured colleagues complain about discrimination. There are no black or coloured officers doing what Van Zyl and Joubert do, and no white officers working in the charge office or cells. Whites get to work on the “third floor” where they are given “unnecessary” administrative jobs. They also drive the smartest and fastest cars. One sergeant argues that putting two white officers on the same shift does not serve the public well.
It doesn’t take too long to figure out why. On Saturday’s patrol Van Zyl and Joubert nabbed a suspected illegal immigrant and drove him around for two hours. Back at the station they asked a black officer to get the suspect to talk in one of South Africa’s African languages. They had to release him when it became clear he was South African.
Sergeant Williams, the station’s shop steward for the Police and Prison Civil Rights Union, says this “small racial incident” shows apartheid is alive in the police. Williams says there are three white officers at the station who refuse to work with their black colleagues.
Constable Thabo Mohlala, who works in the charge office, adds: “Sometimes white people come in and ask to see a white policeman. They just don’t expect black officers to know what they are doing.”
If the daily drag of General Johann Coetzee could be summed up by two characters, they would be detectives Leon Naidoo and Hendrik Wagner. The two are spending the first day of the month, as they always do, wading through administrative work which has to be cleared before they can venture out. Both will quit as soon as good offers come along. “It’s not worth being a policeman these days,” they say, in chorus.
Their grievances include everything from workload to lack of logistical back-up. They are two of 18 detectives, dealing with an average 600 cases a month. Four years ago there were 35 detectives.
Wagner says getting days off to rest is something of the past. In 11 years on the force Naidoo has taken three months’ leave – to study. “If you take long leave or sit back and relax the work will pile up,” he says.
He has no time to be with his family, especially his two children, aged three and five. When he leaves home for work at 6am, they are sleeping. And when he comes back home, usually after 8pm, they are in bed. “When I’m lucky to get a Sunday off I’m too tired to take them out. That develops into a family problem.”
Each detective puts in up to 80 extra hours a month – it is unpaid because there is no money for overtime. The officers do this because they feel they have to. But they say that senior management don’t even meet them halfway: detectives are expected to use their own cellphones on duty and to pay for the calls; they also have to buy the station’s supply of pens, although paper is provided.
Though salaries have improved, the Naidoo family would go unfed if the wife wasn’t also at work. Naidoo takes home R1 200. He spends R400 on petrol, most used in the line of duty, and of course he can’t claim it back. Such conditions, Naidoo and Wagner add, do not really promote a positive attitude.