A woman wearing a black jacket walks along Selby Street in downtown Johannesburg. She’s holding a large rock in one hand and keeps looking over her shoulder, brandishing it at someone following her.
A man in baggy, torn clothes staggers after her. She shouts and throws the stone at him. He wrestles her to the ground, picks her up like a screaming baby, carries her behind a pillar and rapes her.
On the sixth floor of the Carlton Centre, a team of ”incident analysts” sits before a bank of screens, following the events as they unfold. The rape has been caught on film by one of 176 surveillance cameras dotted around the CBD.
Unfortunately, it’s too late to come to the victim’s rescue.
”The cops were busy with another rape somewhere else. It was one of those nights. We had two rapes in one night,” explains Maurice Kordom, operations director at the centre.
The police finally arrive and drag the rapist, pants around his ankles, off the woman. The woman, now screaming, takes off her shoe to beat her assailant.
The crime rate in central Johannesburg has dropped by 80% since surveillance cameras were installed in 2000, says Neville Huxham, communications manager of Cueincident, the company responsible for the management of the cameras. Cape Town was the first city to use such cameras in 1998, and Pretoria installed a surveillance system in 2004.
However, there isn’t a single camera in Hillbrow, Berea and other crime-ridden inner-city suburbs, and the Johannesburg city council is unsure when it will be able to afford to outfit these areas, says Virgil James, spokesperson for the mayoral committee of public safety.
Shaped like a cue ball, one closed-circuit television camera costs R18 000. That’s excluding the kilometres of fibre-optic wire needed to connect the camera to the control room, and the round-the-clock maintenance costs.
The cameras are equipped with 300mm lenses that can bring objects 3km away into sharp focus — such as the man attempting to have sex with a guard dog.
Dressed in smart cream pants and a collared yellow T-shirt, the man saunters up to the sleeping dog and nudges it with his foot. He then bends down to stroke the dog’s penis. When the dog finally stands up, the man unzips his pants and tries to mount the bull mastiff by lifting its hind legs. The dog snaps at him and the man sulkily walks away.
”It’s amazing what people will do when they think no one is watching … We’ve seen men dig holes in the ground to have sex with them,” says Kordom.
The surveillance cameras also caught out a bank employee who spent his lunch break paying a homeless child for sex in Eloff Street Extension.
Lucas Molotsi, an incident analyst, points to a screen showing an empty parking lot that lies between the Nelson Mandela Bridge and the Queen Elizabeth Bridge on Ntemi Piliso Street. ”See all those lights,” he says as he points at groups of blurry fires with men huddled around them, ”that’s a big gambling area. We’ve watched men gamble their cars away here.”
Kordom, who has been watching the screen over Molotsi’s shoulder, instructs him to focus on a group of six clubbers walking down an empty street. Partygoers are followed by the cameras as they stumble home, as drunken people are vulnerable to armed robbery, pickpocketing and rape, says Kordom.
Ndumiso Netshiozwe, an analyst who likes to spend his breaks playing a card game called casino, says he took the job as an analyst in 2003 because he wanted to fight crime. When he’s on his shift, his eyes do not leave the screen for a second, not even while being interviewed.
Netshiozwe says it’s hard to witness terrible incidents on screen, knowing it’s not just a movie. ”Sometimes we see terrible motor-vehicle accidents where there are children involved in the accident,” he says.
While some footage is horrific, such as a taxi driver who deliberately runs over a pedestrian and a robber who shoots a man in the stomach from a metre away, other incidents are just plain bizarre and stupid.
”You know America’s Funniest Home Videos? That’s nothing compared to what we have here,” says Kordom.
We watch a video of a man who smashes a Foschini display window and robs the store of its fully clothed mannequins. ”It was Valentine’s Day, so we took it he was just trying to steal something nice for his girlfriend,” says Kordom, laughing, while we watch the man run into the park with three mannequins under each arm. The romantic thief was arrested within minutes.
Homeless children who live on the city streets use the cameras as protection at night. They usually huddle around the camera at the corner of Fox and Kruis streets; if they need the police, they signal to the camera.
Central Johannesburg used to be so dangerous that the technicians who installed the surveillance cameras were often robbed and needed to be accompanied by the police, says Kordom. ”Now there’s a very big difference … I’m not afraid of Johannesburg any more. It’s no longer a matter of looking over your shoulder.”