Robert Kirby: Loose Cannon
Our own police administration isn’t the only one coming in for continual and unwarranted media criticism. You should hear what they’ve been saying recently about that paragon of constabular integrity, the British police force. More especially the doings of someone they’ve dubbed “Condon of the Yard” – Sir Paul Condon, metropolitan commissioner of police.
It’s a highly sarcastic monicker, because Condon is no favourite with crime reporters. What’s he has done is to forbid all police officers under his intendancy from ever releasing any “unauthorised” police news to the press. If it becomes impossible to bury a crime story the Scotland Yard press bureau will issue the appropriate noises. No statistics are allowed, and most certainly no public warnings by means of alarmist disclosures.
God help the detective inspector of 30 years experience who, over an ale, tells an old crime-reporter friend of his that there’s been a sharp increase in muggings and rape in a certain part of London. In Paul Condon’s world he risks being dumped all the way back to traffic control.
It has been said that Condon had come up with a unique solution: Don’t stop the crime, stop the reporting of the crime.
Which, at last, brings me to my point. A version of the Condon Respite is exactly what we now desperately need in South Africa. The Truth and Reconciliation omission is about to vanish up its own fundament. The Mandela magic wand has been gnawed down to a toothpick. The rand’s burrowed well below basement level and the fiscus has all but washed down Mpumalanga’s housing void. Crime? As the song says: “They’re coming through th e windows, they’re beating down the door.”
I don’t mind going on record saying that the generally punch-drunk South African psycho- matrix has absorbed about as much as it can take. It desperately needs a break. A chance to take stock, to draw breath, to give up sleeping in shifts. As a matter or urgency, the formidable, the generous guiding minds of the newspapers, magazines, radio and telly must gather together in some sort of summit meeting and get a moratorium going. In other words: “Don’t tell us nothing, because us don’t wanna know nothing.”
Think of next Friday, picking up your Mail & Guardian. You turn to page three, brace yourself for your weekly fix of pitiless muck-raking by that pessimistic Mungo Soggot man who, on the most frivolous of evidence, is dumping all over that nice Mr Mkhwanazi just because his R2,4-million house is being financed by Mr Emmanuel Shaw II. (Documents in possession of the M&G).
What do you find in its place? The Condon Respite. Instead of the obdurate Mungo, there’s an article by the queen of jellied sunshine, Gwen Gill, in which she slobbers on about what Ms Gauteng, the lovely Violetta Bheminsangu, had to say at the Mbeki Polo Club Champagne Brunch. Much nicer.
I hope you read that touching article written by two clinical psychologists at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation? It was headlined “Crime’s worst horror is all in the mind” and was brimming with concern about how “ongoing fear, anxiety and obsession about possible victimisation are common reactions to trauma”, how “violence spinning increasingly out of control … fuels a sense of helplessness in the society, in turn psychologically empowering the criminals and preventing us from finding creative solutions” and then the cruncher: ” … the entire population might be suffering from a collective post-traumatic response.”
I know many of you will call the above samples nothing more than further proof that Talk at Will isn’t the only place they sell their wisdom by the bucketful. But what we might ignore at our peril is the article’s central thesis: mentally ravaging truths, like those of which the article warns us in such intellectually supple tones, are bruising our national psyche. It’s time the newspapers, radio and television stopped disseminating them and let the psychologists (and Mr Omar) get on with finding “creative” solutions.
You can’t take the mind out of the crime, but you can at least try to take the crime out of the mind. Or some such equally stirring upliftment. Just imagine how good we’d all feel if they’d stop pouring these realities over us.
Rather, tell it like it never happened and it’s as likely not to happen so often. Sounds so simple doesn’t it? But then, the principle of coronary by-pass surgery is very simple. It’s also very effective.