To experience the Johannesburg Metro Police force as a citizen and not as a journalist is to escape its spin on reams of statistics and the feel-good, ”make ’em feel safe” big talk of its chief, Chris Ngcobo, and spokesperson Edna Mamonyane.
When the Metro Police was started, the idea was good. The police meant to undertake a version of New York’s ”broken windows” policing: prosecute even small crime so that a law-abiding culture becomes institutionalised.
But since then, all I have seen is city cops speed-trapping by camera on various city bridges; stopping people (together with the South African Police Service) to hear their accents to ensure they are not kwerekwere and last week’s grand launch of Operation Token Days, part of the 500-day operation to clean up Jozi.
Clean it up of what, precisely? Beggars, blind immigrants from Zimbabwe and children whose worker parents leave them in illegal créches in the city centre, according to reports.
As a citizen, I’m shamed by the beggars at every intersection; saddened by the blind Zimbabweans; and horrified at the sight of their little ones crying on city pavements after being locked out of inner-city créches in breach of by-laws.
But I’m scared of muggers, petrified at the thought of rapists and almost paralysed at the wheel by the driving style of city taxis. Yet, I do not see nor hear that these real menaces are in target range of the Metro Police. I’d love to see them ”cleaned up”, especially the taxis. Operation Winged Heart (to ensure safe, law-abiding taxis); Operation Sethunya (to clamp down on illegal firearms) and other plans seem to be on the back-burner. The Metro Police is going for the easy targets to ramp up the feel-good statistics — it is illusory crime-fighting.
Increasingly the Metro Police’s menaces are the poor and the powerless: beggars, hawkers and illegal immigrants, who have found themselves on the flip side of freedom and in the Jozi far removed from the hip, funky city of the middle-class inhabits.
And of course, there are rotters among the desperate and probably among the blind; but is it really ours (or the city fathers’) to decree that therefore all may not make an effort to survive off the coins of those of us with so much more?
As last week’s operation showed, it is a huge waste of police time. By the next day, the beggars were mostly back at their station. Mayor Amos Masondo’s mandate is to make Johannesburg a global city: But which global model are we considering? Cities such as Mexico City, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Nairobi, Cairo and Mumbai all wear their challenges on their streets. Favelas, slums or what we call informal settlements are part of the urban architecture; begging is omnipresent; migrants are everywhere. Of course they have mayors who have tried versions of Operation Token Days, but all have found that the problems of poverty are not so easily hidden. This is no argument for ”lawlessness”, but one rather for effective law enforcement. As a citizen, I don’t like my taxes spent on token programmes when the taxis are still out there …