In this special report Khadija Magardie opens a window on one of the country’s most dangerous occupations policing, where pressure to fight crime is coming at an increasingly heavy cost
There is a claustrophobic yet expansive, rushed yet benign feeling to the onset of early evening in Johannesburg, almost a sense of foreboding. At best it conjures up images from Athol Fugard’s People Are Living There.
For thousands of residents not preparing for a night on the town are, like Milly, sitting at their kitchen table, listening to the steady swish of traffic to the city. Many take comfort in the sight of the blue-and-white patrol cars on the streets, as the sun goes down.
As the nightlife begins, so does the shift of the “dusk-to-dawn” officers of the South African Police Service emergency response unit, the Flying Squad.
Parade
It’s 5.35pm at the unit’s headquarters at the base of the Brixton tower, just beyond the twinkle of the city lights. The first thing one notices in the parade room, apart from the huge map of the city, are the large, blue words straddling two walls: “Striving for Excellence.” The Oxford Concise English dictionary defines “strive” as: “to try hard, to make efforts, to struggle or contend.” And striving they are.
All is not well in the policing arena. Crime levels are escalating, the courts are overburdened, the jails are full and, critics say, the police are too lazy and/or incompetent to fight the scourge. The public, in general, has a poor image of the blue uniform. To wear it denotes a plethora of titles: idiot, illiterate, buffoon. But the more stinging descriptions exist in the Afrikaans language: “slapgat”, “gaataa”, “vokken vark”. Boer.
Those who may escape the name-calling are dying like flies. The country is experiencing a frightening trend that is taking its toll on law enforcement: criminals who kill policemen with impunity, callousness and, perhaps most frighteningly, intent. According to the office of the National Police Commissioner, 200 policemen are killed in this country every year averaging one death every two days. A similarly gung-ho establishment, New York City, by contrast, lost three police officers out of a force of 41 000 last year all in car accidents.
The duty officer, Captain Leondrain Pillay, is briefing the officers on their shift including telling them who they are assigned to work with and alerting them to possible difficulties they may encounter. A building in Rosebank, believed to house the Israeli Trade Mission to South Africa and the country’s national carrier, El-Al, has received bomb threats. Every officer on duty has to check up on the building at least twice during the shift. Afterwards, Pillay announces the availability of “refresher courses”, such as advanced driving and weapons handling, and notes who wants to go.
The officers are then inspected to see if they comply with dress regulations, right down to the shoelaces. In this unit a police-issue bulletproof vest is compulsory. Lastly, members have to present their pocketbook to Pillay, in which they have to record every event of the night, no matter how arbitrary it may seem.
Before they depart, a moment of silence. The last words they hear before they go out the door are Pillay’s: “To those working outside, take care of yourselves”.
Robocops
Sergeants Quinton Watson and Rikus van den Berg, two of tonight’s duty cops, are instantly disagreeable to the uninitiated. They swagger when they walk, shout instead of talking to people on the streets and brandish their gleaming rifles at every opportunity.
At least Watson manages to smile, occasionally. The tall, barrel-chested, brush-cut Van den Berg is the epitome of what a “good policeman” (at least in apartheid’s heyday) was supposed to be. In the blue bulletproof vest he is undoubtedly a handy asset to whip out when dealing with difficult types on the streets. His colleagues will testify to the fact that the mere sight of him is enough to encourage good behaviour from suspects.
Yet both policemen, off the beat, are friendly. One of “tough cop” Watson’s favourite movies is The Lion King. Van den Berg coos about the latest addition to his family, a baby daughter.
One soon learns that the Flying Squad officers often have to leave their personalities on the seat of the car. These are mean streets, with a mean beat, and to be anything less than tough as nails could be fatal.
With a screech of tyres, the Flying Squad vehicle arrives at the scene of the first complaint of the evening. A luxury Audi is parked in a Hillbrow street. Drawing his firearm, Watson approaches the car from the side. “In this country, you can never underestimate a criminal, sometimes being friendly is a sign of weakness,” he explains, in defence of the Robocop image they project on the streets.
The four occupants, all youngsters, are told to step out of the car, hands on their heads. After Watson has checked the driver’s licence and the boot, they are free to go.
Suspicious-looking cars are among the more commonly reported cases the unit has to deal with; for a country where vehicle theft continues to spiral. After checking out another suspicious vehicle in Albertsville, the patrol car is called to an attempted car theft in the same area. The suspects were disturbed while trying to wheel a car out of the owner’s home. In such cases, which are defined according to how life-threatening they are, the Flying Squad essentially a “back-up” to the stations hands over the case to the local police, but where violence has occurred, they stay to assist.
Action stations
Watson’s mother cried when he told her he was leaving his Wentworth, Durban, home for a police job in Johannesburg. But the 29-year-old, who has been a policeman for nine years, says he was not put off by the horror stories of rape, murder and mayhem in Gauteng. He admits that initially it was a scary experience, especially driving into the townships after dark, but the fear soon wears off. “There’s just no time to be scared.”
The next call takes them to Hill- brow to deal with a case of domestic violence. It turns out to be a crank call. The new Domestic Violence Act obliges police to intervene in such situations and when the life of the woman is threatened, they have to remove her from the premises and arrest the offender. But more often than not the woman pleads with the police not to take her partner away or refuses to lay a charge, says Watson.
Not surprisingly, the later it gets, the more lively the complaints. One of the night’s most bizarre reports was of a taxi driver robbing a woman. Siren blaring, the Flying Squad vehicle sped off to Berea. As it turns out, the driver had short-changed the purse-lipped woman by R2 she spent R1 calling the Flying Squad from a public phone.
A favourite pastime of the officers is to carry out informal busts on Hillbrow’s seedy hotels, such as the notorious Sands. In many cases, the occupants have little time to react and are caught red-handed with narcotics. A bleary-eyed, white couple sitting in their car outside the Sands admit they came to buy cocaine, but the dealer ran away when he saw the police car both look too stoned to realise they may be implicating themselves.
But times are changing many dealers are protected by an informal network of look-outs. As soon as an officer approaches, the look-out emits a low whistling sound. It gives the operators upstairs time to hide their stash. Though there are people who are willing to assist the police, the majority of the encounters on the streets imply that members of the public are covering up criminal activity.
During a coffee break at a roadhouse Watson explains the difficulties. Despite racing to a scene at breakneck speed, they are always met with cries of “you were not quick enough”. He says the public are not aware that the unit is specialised and different crimes are allocated to different units within the force. As a result, the Flying Squad is blamed when the local police station’s officers are too slow to react or arrive when the suspects are long gone. Before the steam subsides on the polystyrene cups, the officers have to rush off to the scene of another crime a robbery in Hillbrow.
The officers’ cars are linked to the Flying Squad’s control room, a maze of L-shaped desks that receive complaints and dispatch vehicles to the scene. Each suburb is clustered into a zone, which has a specific channel at the 10111 centre. Each centre is operated by a specialist policeman who identifies which patrol car is in the area and directs the cars to the exact location. There is also a quick dispatch to specialised units, such as the Dog Unit and the Sexual Offences Unit, and channels to ambulances and hospitals.
The scene in Hillbrow looks like it comes straight out of a television cop drama a suspect, bleeding from the mouth, is lying face down in the middle of the road. Some officers are already on the scene two are standing guard with their firearms drawn, while a third cuffs the suspect. The victim stands nearby, visibly shaken. Both policemen, Sergeants Mike Linnell and Ian Findlay, are reservists who do the job not for money but “for the love of it”. Linnell, a practising physiotherapist, jokes: “I break the criminals, then I help put them back together again.”
Mission improbable
The 120 000-strong force is still grappling with transformation, education and training. Racial integration has been difficult and remains incomplete. The amalgamation of former South African Police members, the police from the former homelands, the kitskonstabels (untrained people who were hired off the streets by the apartheid government to do police work) and the inclusion of township self-defence units into the ranks have, according to analysts, disrupted established loyalties within the force and chains of command.
This is most evident in the training of recruits. Historically, police training in South Africa has been of a military nature, with the notion of “community policing” virtually non-existent. Police managers say new recruits are rigorously trained in various policing activities for a full year. But the skills and experience imbalances created by apartheid have ensured that there are numerous members in the force who should not be there.
Nowadays recruits must have a matric certificate. This is a recent requirement, so a large proportion of the older members (including some instructors at basic training colleges) do not have this qualification. Last week the Department of Public Service and Administration issued in a Sunday newspaper an invitation to tender for the conducting of baseline research into functional literacy for members of the SAPS. It is estimated that 26000 police officers are illiterate.
By international standards there are sufficient police officers for the size of the population, but many lack experience in crucial areas such as conflict resolution, musketry and physical training. Moreover, the majority of the training is conducted by institutions that trained officers under the old regime. The police colleges have been deracialised, but staff bodies remain largely the same. The skewed resource allocation meant that white recruits, such as Van den Berg, received the best training. The former army officer has had not only standard police fare, but specialised instruction and SWAT training. Such highly trained policemen seldom do standard police work, but are head-hunted by the special units. And these units are the “cream of the crop” with lower ranks receiving less training even though they are more likely to interact with the public.
The untrained black policemen far outnumber their white counterparts. The gaps in the levels of training between the “old guard” and the “new guard” an inevitably racial division have fuelled tensions, especially with the older, more established members in the officer ranks, who view their colleagues as a liability to the force.
“I will work with anyone, I don’t care who they are, just as long as they do the job and don’t expect favours,” says Van den Berg. Watson concurs. He says it bodes ill for policing if a member is assigned to the unit who is not at optimum fitness, cannot shoot accurately and is not able to use the force often required to prevent suspects from fleeing.
Then there is the pay. Most officers receive paltry salaries, hardly commensurate with the danger involved. The already meagre income is subject to heavy tax and other reductions, leaving an officer with about R700 a month to spend. But this has not exhausted the passion they have for the job.
“No matter what, I will never leave the force, I love it too much”, says Watson. They have stopped outside a caf in Jan Hofmeyer for coffee and for Van den Berg to buy a Lotto ticket. When asked what he would do with the money if he won, his immediate answer is: “retire”. Barely a split second later he says he was joking. And though some may consider it madness, the two say their only ambition is to get more training and move up the ranks. But never, ever, to leave.
By early morning the shift ends at 6am things have quietened down. One of the last complaints to deal with is an extraordinary scene played out at below zero temperatures on the street outside former president Nelson Mandela’s Houghton home. A young woman, with a baby strapped to her back, is remonstrating with the security guards about why she should be let in to see Mandela, to ask him why he had not given her a house. No amount of cajoling can convince the woman, who says she travelled from Vosloorus, to leave, so the Flying Squad has to be called in. After almost half an hour of negotiations the woman leaves, but not before directing a few choice epithets at the police.
Much of the unit’s work involves waiting for things to happen. It’s standard procedure to patrol residential and industrial areas during the early hours of the morning when break-ins are most likely to occur. This “spook patrol”, when the car’s headlights are switched off, provides many opportunities to catch suspects by surprise. It’s also mundane. The perception of the Flying Squad is that of blazing guns, high-speed car chases and other “exciting” work. This does happen, but very rarely.
The detectives
The “action men” are the detectives who take over the case from the police. Once a suspect has been apprehended and taken to the local police station, the officers assist in opening a docket if the crime is minor, but in serious cases must wait for a detective to arrive. It is the detective’s job to secure the scene and ensure that forensic evidence is taken. The detective is responsible for the docket right up to the time that the suspect is tried and sentenced. The detectives also testify in court for each and every case assigned to them. In most cases, they are “silent operators” who arrive without too much fuss, in plainclothes and unmarked cars, but are a crucial complement to the policemen’s work. Unless backup is needed, it is the detective who tracks down and apprehends a suspect or suspects. Again, dangerous work, with the same poor work conditions.
But, as Watson says, if money or status is the motivation, you’re in the wrong job. He admits that the relationship between the police and those they protect is symbiotic: “They need us, but we also need them being out there makes our own lives exciting and a bit of a thrill.” His sentiments echo those of countless policemen who say no deterioration of conditions would make them leave the force. But, they hasten to add, politicians need to see how they work and experience the pressures they face before making drastic decisions such as the one to stop giving police who work on the streets “danger pay” of about R400.
In most instances, it’s true. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their own interest.” But for South Africa’s overworked and underpaid policemen and women on the front line every day, Adam Smith was wrong. For anyone who bears witness to their lives, they appear either of two things martyrdom or madness.
@Online Aids fight can slash care costs
A Web-based project aims to bring HIV treatment costs down to as little as R8 a person a month
Charlene Smith
South Africa and Botswana will pioneer the world’s largest Web-based HIV treatment and care programme that will slash the costs of HIV treatment and extend care to hundreds of thousands more people.
Using sophisticated Internet technology, the fight against Aids can go into the poorest areas of Southern Africa, bringing treatment that would have been considered unattainable a few months ago.
The non-profit programme, Right to Care (R2C), will extend Web-based patient diagnostics, treatment and care through the two countries, which will ultimately see patient care for HIV-positive patients, supervised by a doctor, cost as little as R8 a month.
The Web project is pioneered by the University of Witwatersrand’s Clinical HIV Trials Unit under Dr Ian Sanne and is likely to begin its first project with Anglo American’s HIV programme for staff on September 1.
R2C is also working with the Botswana government and having discussions with a multinational, medical aid schemes and a large government parastatal about extending the programme through their workforces.
Currently, anti-retroviral drug treatments cost patients between R600 and R1 500 a month with lab tests of R466 a month. Through R2C costs will drop to a total of R700 a month with administration fees of R30 a patient a month for the first 5 000 patients. Once there are 100 000 patients on the programme costs will drop to R10 a month and by the time there are 250 000 patients, the monthly cost for patient care, including lab tests and monitoring by a doctor, will be down to R8 a month.
Sanne says they are also examining reducing viral load tests from four to two a year and have successfully developed a programme that will reduce CD4 testing (to measure the strength of the immune system) by 70%.
The patient-monitoring programme, developed in the United States, has 36 researchers consistently inputting new data, whether drug-related information, research or recommendations from users. It personalises patient information, including notifying the doctor or nurse of drugs likely to induce toxicities or react against each other in a patient. This reduces drug failures and associated costs.
The US pilot study has begun at 10 sites in that country with 4 000 patients. However, the Southern African aspects have been modified to suit this environment.
The programme uses data for research and statistical information critical to drug manufacturers, epidemiologists, doctors and patients. Drugs are not limited to registered pharmaceuticals but can include generics and are tailored to what is available.
Security of data is a critical aspect of the programme with information being protected by double key encryption banks are protected by single key encryption. Patient records will also be encoded by the patient’s fingerprint to identify blood samples sent to labs, as an example.
On Monday South African researchers, including Sanne’s team, presented evidence at an international Aids conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, of 16 clinical trials involving almost 800 HIV-positive people. The trials, of people “in resource-poor settings from three academic clinical trial units” in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Soweto, showed anti-retroviral therapy can succesfully be given to poor people.
Economist Nicoli Natrass of the University of Cape Town has shown it will cost the South African government more than R850-million a year not to give anti-retroviral treatment.
Anti-retrovirals are now cheaper than cardiac or cancer care and in line with the costs of other long-term illnesses such as diabetes.
The Three Centres study, conducted since 1995, showed that of the 763 people on the trials, only 26 (less than 3,5%) dropped out.
The average age of those on the trials was 35 and treatment discontinuation was highest among those in the 20 to 30 age group.
Sanne pointed out that although most of the research was urban or peri-urban based, more than 60% of South Africa’s population is urbanised.
“However, we have done distance treatment in rural settings using IT expertise. Our research shows that with an indigent research base we get the same results as in international settings. However, we had a far better success rate with women here than internationally.
“The toxicity ranges were low, also similar to those in developed nations, but we need to get a spectrum of toxicity that reflects our population more accurately.” The Three Centres research used triple therapy.
What does the programme need to begin? More than 50% of clinics and labs in South Africa are offline and the government is urging faster connectivity.
In Botswana, for example, five computers will be used to monitor 5 000 patients with a 56K dial-up connection, although Sanne says they are hoping to install a 128K line to a server.
IBM in Botswana is considering issuing palm pilots to doctors and nurses so that they can download patient information into the system daily. Johnnic is examining satellite connections for South African sites.
@Handheld PC bridges digital divide
South Africa could learn from Indian scientists who invented a cheap device enabling the poor and illiterate to surf the Internet
Stuart Millar
>From the outside, the Simputer is nothing special: a grey box the size of an electronic organiser, with a black and white screen and four chunky buttons.
But the handheld device might solve the most pressing problem of the Internet age: how to get developing countries online. The Simputer, short for simple computer, promises to have as profound an impact on communications in the developing world as the clockwork radio of the British inventor Trevor Bayliss.
The device took a group of Indian scientists almost three years to develop. It will give online access for about R1 642, a fraction of the cost of a PC, when it becomes commercially available in India early next year.
Unlike the PC, it does not need a mains electricity supply but runs on three AAA batteries.
The Simputer’s most revolutionary feature, however, is that it eliminates the biggest single barrier to computer use in the third world: illiteracy.
Almost 50% of India’s population is unable to read or write. To overcome this, engineers at the Indian Institute of Sciences in Bangalore, epicentre of the country’s hi-tech activity, and a local software company, Encore, developed a remarkable piece of text-to-speech software.
Called Information Markup Language or Illiterate Markup Language by the inventors the software allows the Simputer to translate English text into a variety of Indian languages, then read the information aloud to the user.
Swami Manohar, a scientist at the institute and a senior member of the team, said: “We spent a lot of time analysing how IT could really impact on the developing economies this was before the phrase digital divide [between rich and poor nations] became fashionable.
“Then we resolved that, instead of declaring what needed to be done, as technologists we would just do it.”
To start with, the Simputer will be targeted at India, where there are two million PCs for a population of one billion.
Because the developers are licensing the hardware to manufacturers cheaply, and making the software available free under licence so that it can constantly be upgraded and distributed, the technology, especially text-to-speech, is likely to spread quickly to other countries.
The need is overwhelming. According to estimates from the World Resources Institute in Washington, more than four billion people worldwide remain untouched by the IT revolution yet the global economy is increasingly reliant on electronic communications and information.
“It is not access to technology but access to information that is critical,” Manohar said.
“There are tonnes of initiatives coming out of New Delhi poverty alleviation schemes, women’s welfare and caste/tribe welfare schemes but unless a person who is eligible actually knows that the schemes exist, it is not going to help them.
“The Simputer could improve their lives radically.”
He envisages farmers, for example, using the Simputer to go online to access land records or to find out which markets would pay the best price for their products.
Electronic banking is another potentially massive use.
There are similar projects elsewhere. In Brazil, for example, a cheap, no-frills computer, the Computador Popular (or the Volkscomputer, as local people call it in imitation of the popular VW car) is being developed as part of a government-backed scheme to bridge the digital divide. It will have an estimated price tag of about R1 877, including monitor.
The Simputer’s text-to-speech capabilities put it well ahead of the pack.
It works by breaking words down into basic sounds, then putting them back together in an Indian language, using a library of 1 200 sounds that is adequate for most dialects.
At present it can translate from English into Hindi, Kannada and Tamil; the developers say it will be easy to apply the same basic principles to any other language.
“The resulting speech sounds quite artificial, very much like the robots of science fiction movies,” said Manohar.
“But in terms of understandability, it will be 99,9% for native speakers of that language. After listening to a few sentences, the person’s brain gets calibrated to understand the accent.”
To keep costs down, the inventors have absorbed all the development costs themselves, a bill that could have run to as much as R234,6-million if the Simputer had been put together in Silicon Valley in the United States. They have also used free “open source” software, such as the Linux operating system, wherever possible. The project’s website is www.simputer.org.