Steven Friedman worm’s eye view We can let the police do what they want – or we can try to make them do what we want. Sometimes, an experience helps us understand issues better than abstract debate.
The recent arrest of my colleague Xolela Mangcu is an example: it helped crystallise what is wrong with the attitude to policing of many in our society, including Minister of Safety and Security Steve Tshwete. Mangcu, one of our foremost black intellectuals, was arrested by two white police officers for no particular reason. Our best guess is that they assumed that a black man wearing a baseball cap and denim jacket, but driving a fairly expensive car, was a thief. One part of the story that has not been told is that, not far from the Centre for Policy Studies where he was arrested, a real crime was being committed at roughly the same time. The police failed to show the same zeal in dealing with it as they did in pursuing a law-abiding citizen. A common wisdom is that our crime rate is high because police are fettered by politically correct human rights law and a trendy desire to submit them to civilian control through the Constitution. If only they were allowed to do their jobs, we are told, the criminals would be reined in. Tshwete has partly endorsed this, proposing to give police greater freedom and attacking human rights activists for not caring enough about crime’s victims. But the Mangcu incident shows that, if we allow police to do what they like, we are not necessarily giving them a licence to fight crime. We may, rather, be giving them free rein to harass black scholars while the criminals do what they like. Unconditional support for the police assumes that they want to fight crime. Some officers do – they should have no problem doing so while respecting citizens’ rights. But, if those who arrested Mangcu were allowed to do what they want, we now know what they would want to do. Allowing them to do it may enhance polarisation and discredit democracy: it will not reduce crime. It is worth remembering this when, for example, we consider the widespread view in the government that the law controlling the police’s right to fire on suspects should be relaxed. If we do give officers greater scope to fire on people, how do we know that those upon whom they fire will be criminals? Mangcu may have been picked on because he is black. But his experience may also be part of a trend in which some police officers revel in showing force to those who will not fight back, steering away from criminals who will: a suburban woman recounted recently being descended upon by a troop of police officers who had arrived to serve a summons. So shows of police strength – which many, including Tshwete, want to allow – may simply allow officers to throw their weight around rather than tackling criminals. Nor are we the only society in which police failure to honour citizens’ rights creates many abuses, but very little crime fighting: Brazil, for example, has a police force with a poor human rights record – and an equally indifferent one in fighting crime. In Mangcu’s case, the need to subject the police to the Constitution was further highlighted by their boasts, in the privacy of the police station, that they, not Tshwete – who Mangcu had contacted on being arrested – or, presumably, the Constitution, were the law. So ironically, in his desire to show his crime-fighting zeal, the minister may be endorsing approaches that will weaken his own control over the force – along with that of the rest of us. The incident seems to show not that there is not too much constitutional and civilian control over the police, but too little. Tshwete is the elected political head of the police – he is there to ensure that they do what voters want them to do. By contacting him, Mangcu was insisting on holding him to account. The less control under the law that the minister has over the police, the less can he ensure that they account to us as well as him. Some in the government argue that concern to ensure civilian control over the police – one of whose expressions was the creation of a civilian Secretariat of Safety and Security – is now pass: there is no longer a need to ensure that officers end apartheid-era behaviour, the crying need now, they suggest, is crime prevention. Some analysts add that the appointment of a civilian, Jackie Selebi, as national police commissioner, gives us as much civilian control as we need. Again, Mangcu’s experience contradicts that. The practices that civilian control was designed to end are still alive – the appointment of one individual at the head of the police cannot change that. One other myth that might have been shaken by Mangcu’s trauma is that expertise in the police is being eroded by affirmative action: at the Hillbrow police station, where he was taken after his arrest, it was the black officers who acknowledged that there was no case against him, the white ones who seemed intent on continuing to make things difficult for him. This does not mean black officers are automatically efficient and honest. Given our racial divides, it is possible that they would have been less sympathetic had a white person been the victim.
But Mangcu’s ordeal does suggest that white officers steeped in the old ways may not be sources of expertise, but liabilities. Those who worry about the erosion of police “skills” in crime fighting forget that, in the old order, there was not much of that on show: an official history of the police acknowledged in 1980 that only one out of 10 officers was fighting crime – the rest were presumably administrators, or busy preventing people violating apartheid laws. A commission headed by British policeman Peter Waddington found in 1992 that our police crime-fighting methods were backward. The loss of white officers does not necessarily lose us skills – and, in some cases, might help us gain them. So the “trendy” agenda for police reform – which stresses submitting police to the Bill of Rights and promoting changes in personnel and approach – is not a luxury that distracts us from reducing crime. It is essential to any serious crime-fighting strategy. If the Mangcu affair is to do anything more than remind us that our past is very much with us, it should prompt Tshwete to reconsider an approach that is more likely to deliver solid citizens into the hands of the police than to protect us from crime.