The biggest shortcoming of that great fable about the boy who cried wolf is that we are never told about the consequences that befall people who are genuine in their clamour, or the repercussions to those who are not so candid.
In present-day South Africa, many continue to cry wolf. In light of such cries, the police issued a statement just before April Fool’s Day, warning that anyone who made vexatious calls to the cops would have the might of the law visited upon them.
On election day, a group of about 60 Landless People’s Movement (LPM) members complained about police treatment after they were arrested allegedly for violating the Electoral Act by holding a demonstration on election day.
The LPM’s Mangaliso Kubheka said three of their members were ”subjected to interrogation, harassment and physical violence” after their arrests. They had not laid charges against the police by early this week, but did complain to the Independent Complaints Directorate. Until they held a press conference their allegations of torture had been carried in the media in an extremely piecemeal fashion. The attitude in many newsrooms, including my own, was one of ”we’ve heard that one before”. ÂÂ
In February, the Aboriginal community went on a rampage in Australia after 17-year-old Thomas Hickey was impaled on a fence when he fell from his bicycle. His mother said that her son was being pursued by the police, a charge the cops denied.
Whatever the truth may be, the Aborigine community based their reaction on how they had been treated by the police historically.
Back home, the rape charge levelled against Judge Siraj Desai and the subsequent withdrawal of the charge by Salome Isaacs elicited warnings about crying wolf. Her detractors suggested she had set the anti-woman abuse movement back. The thinking was that, because Isaacs had not followed her complaints through (thereby ”proving” that hers was a vexatious and baseless allegation), women would now find it difficult to be believed when they made allegations of rape.
In our courts criminal suspects — especially those arrested for violent crimes such as murder and robbery — regularly accuse their arresting officers of torture and other underhanded methods of extracting confessions from them.
In many cases, the courts have believed the police’s version — that the offenders had a Damascene conversion, saw the error of their ways and volutarily chose to point out the scenes of their most heinous crimes.
Few judges and prosecutors buy the story that the alleged victims chose not to make a formal complaint because they have lost faith in the criminal justice system. They rightly point to the establishment of police oversight bodies such as the Independent Complaints Directorate, as an avenue that complainants can follow if they are unhappy or distrusting of the police’s willingness to help.
I don’t have any evidence that police continue to force confessions out of suspects, but I refuse to believe that all criminal suspects are gently persuaded or moved by some holy spirit to point out the scenes of their most ghastly deeds.
In high school, a group of male teachers known to be the enforcers of school policy were called the ”Brixton”, after the notorious Brixton murder and robbery unit — infamous for making tough guys reveal all about their crimes and their cronies.
The point here is that torture was institutionalised and all of us knew someone who had suffered under the employees of the Department of Law and Order, as it was then called.
In its 2003 report the Independent Complaints Directorate said it had received 528 notifications of deaths of people in police custody and as a result of police action.
The report did not say how many of these deaths were prima facie as a result of police action, but it goes without saying that while the police could not be blamed for all the complaints that have been laid, they must have been responsible for at least some of them.
It is undeniable that the wolf has been defamed many times by those riding on its repu- tation. Just as wolves attacking sheep were common in the unnamed land of storybooks, we live in the shadow of rape and torture.
And just as that community should have learnt that they could not afford to be less vigilant of their sheep because of a childish prank, South Africans cannot afford to pretend that police don’t sometimes resort to torture or that only ”bad” women fall victim to rape.
The beauty of the most memorable of childhood storybooks is that each story has a moral, which we are meant to remember as we grew older.
In The Boy Who Cried Wolf we are told that after the villagers learnt that the wolf had indeed devoured some sheep and that others had fled in terror, the boy became forlorn and isolated.
An old man comforted the boy and promised him that in the morning he would help him look for the lost sheep. The old man went on to say: ”Nobody believes a liar, even when he is telling the truth.”
It is a lesson to us to guard against ”complaint fatigue”, because it could mean that we lose a constitutional guarantee of the right to ”conditions of detention that are consistent with human dignity”.