A year or two ago, an old friend of mine, Jones, was sitting in her home when she heard the sound of a coconut hitting concrete. Intrigued, she wandered outside. Her house borders Steurhof station in Cape Town’s southern suburbs, and, hearing a commotion, she peered over her wall. The concrete, it turned out, had been the platform of the station and the coconut had been the head of a young woman, mugged and thrown off a moving train.
As a small crowd of commuters gathered around the bloodied and shocked heap, Jones ran back into her house and dialed 10111. Yes, she panted, she’d like to report someone thrown off a train at Steurhof. She was hurt, she thought, but not … The operator cut in.
“You want to report a what?” he said.
“A woman has been thrown off a train.”
“Off a what?”
“A train. At Steurhof station.”
“Is he still on the train?”
“What?”
“Is the person who has been assaulted still on the train?”
And so it went. Was the train still in the station? Why had the woman been thrown off the train? What was Jones’s name? What? Joan? Oh, Jones. Did Jones know the woman who had thrown the, er, oh, who had been thrown off the train? Finally he decided that an officer of the law needed to be dispatched and asked for the name of the station. A minute later Jones was still halfway through trying to spell out “Steurhof”. At last, raising her voice, she resorted to fuzz lingo.
“It’s STEURHOF. Sierra, Tango, Echo, Uniform, Romeo, Hotel, Oscar, Romeo!”
There was a long pause, and then the operator said, “What?”
Bellowing, Jones demanded to speak to someone who knew all the letters of the alphabet, at which point there was the sound of a mouth slapping shut.
“You are irritating me now,” said the operator, and hung up. End of story.
Thanks to countless similar examples of primordial public service, it has become too easy, and too fashionable, to deride the country’s police force as a backÂwater where the recently lobotomised go to spend their summers scraping applesauce off their bibs and their winters huddled over braziers full of blazing dockets. This is a cruel and sweeping generalisation. Many police are extraordinarily brave, superbly trained and show the sort of devotion to their work that suggests policing is a calling rather than a profession.
The officers of the Claremont station, for instance, have a reputation for responding with otherworldly haste. No sooner has one started speaking into the telephone than they arrive, with squawks and blue flashes and Roger-Rogers and static, toting portable howitzers and light-sabers, to tell Mrs Liebestein downstairs to turn down her Pat Boone LP.
No, there are some superb officers on the beat. But there are also some truly appalling ones. It may be a thin blue line here and there but, at least in its call centres, the South African Police Service can be extraordinarily thick.
Of course, those manning the front gate at the Qalakabusha “correctional centre” in Empangeni don’t seem to be rocket scientists either. That nobody noticed a gang of inmates hacking through a perimeter fence is odd enough. That no suspicions were raised by seeing 10 men in stripy pajamas wedging themselves into one Volkswagen Polo before speeding off, rivets pinging and axels groaning, is doubly queer. But the real giveaway in all this, the gem that suggested not administrative foot-dragging but Neanderthal knuckle-dragging, was the subsequent manhunt, launched without a single photograph of a single escapee being disseminated. Excuse me, brother-man, did you just escape from Qalakabusha, or do you and your five comrades simply like to come to this rustic spot of an afternoon and hammer at shackles with a half-brick? The latter? Well, Godspeed, and enjoy the hammering …
All of which is why one was filled with such hope at the weekend, reading about the success American police have had in curbing speeding by planting lifelike cardboard cutouts of children next to troublesome stretches of road. Why didn’t we think of it before? Cardboard policemen! They look scary, can absorb water, make splendid temporary shelters; and best of all their communication skills more than meet basic SAPS call-centre requirements.
But why stop there? We already have a lifelike cardboard cutout minister of health, loitering at the end of local runways in the hope of nabbing a flighty deputy, while reporting to a lifelike cardboard cutout of a state president. Isn’t it time for a morale-boosting cardboard cutout of the minister of safety and security, who can be parked at the arrivals hall of OR Tambo International with cheerful speech bubbles stapled to his face? Perhaps a typical South African greeting: “You are irritating me now.”