The exclusive, leafy suburb of Sandton in Johannesburg recently witnessed an extraordinary show of police might as specially trained officers parachuted from the sky and others abseiled down the side of tall buildings.
The display was meant to reassure everyone about the South African Police Service’s [SAPS] ability to tackle any trouble at the World Cup.
But the exhibition also confirmed a widely held view that the police, whose job should be primarily to preserve the conditions necessary for the safe exercise of public rights and freedoms, are being turned into warriors.
It has been proposed that SAPS should be turned into SAPF — a force instead of a service. Military ranks have been introduced for senior police officers. A draft Criminal Procedure Amendment Bill has been introduced, allowing police to gun down people suspected of having committed serious violent crime when “there are no other reasonable means of carrying out the arrest”.
In a crude sense the politicians are perhaps right to introduce such a law. Widespread popular demands have been made for guarantees of greater security for citizens based on the premise that gun-toting criminals are best repelled with force. Advocates of the new policy say it should not be viewed as a “shoot-to-kill” measure but as one that seeks to “shoot-to-protect” law-abiding citizens.
Regarding the new ranks, Nathi Mthethwa, the Minister of Police, has argued that they are part of a wider government plan to transform the police into a “disciplined force” capable of “fighting crime and fighting it tough”.
He said that the “people’s war against criminals” required a police force led by a “commander” — former commissioner, now general, Bheki Cele. The new nomenclature is not a simple name-change but “a change in attitude, thinking and operational duties”, said Mthethwa.
Policies that allow the police to assume a more military stance and to use deadly force are not a new phenomenon. They have already been adopted in other parts of Africa to greatly different effects.
In some countries, such as Nigeria, crime rates rose when police operations employing the policy were euphemistically described as “fire for fire”, “flush and crush” and led to many incidents of “stray bullets” killing innocent people.
By contrast, in others, such approaches appear to have had a beneficial effect. “Shoot-to-kill” policies in Rwanda and Uganda reportedly diminished the threat posed by armed criminals.
But, successful or not, such policies are often greeted with popular discontent. In 2006 Tanzania created a new ministry of public safety and security to crack down on rising armed crime and implemented a “shoot-to-kill” policy. The result was an upsurge in the number of innocent Tanzanians killed by police in crossfire and a heated debate led to the ministry being disbanded in February 2008.
Experience has shown that an aggressive public security policy can provide some relief from violent crime. But with regard to building an effective police service, or force, in the long term, the aggressive policy essentially addresses symptoms rather than causes.
The new “attitude” being promoted by Mthethwa — and implemented by potentially trigger-happy police — will leave many citizens feeling unprotected, victimised even, by a system that should be meant to protect them.
Fikile Mbalula, the deputy minister of police, who spoke at a recent meeting in Cape Town organised by the Centre for Conflict Resolution, acknowledged that innocent civilians would die in the crossfire between criminals and police.
There have already been many reports of civilians being killed.
While the approach may put some violent criminals on the back foot in the short term, it may not foster the police’s capability to investigate properly and prevent crime.
The killings of innocent civilians by gun-toting men and women in blue are likely to further erode already low levels of public trust in the police. The reality is that without the cooperation of local communities police are unlikely to be able to investigate and stem crime effectively.
In fact, it is clear that Cele is concerned about the quality of the police as a whole and the government has pitched the militarisation of public security as part of a considered, comprehensive plan to revamp an inadequate system.
In tandem with rhetoric about being “very harsh” on criminals, Cele recently said: “We have got pockets of disaster in the South African police as an organisation.” He said the police had been wrongly “increasing numbers with less skills”. The new vision for the force, he said, was to improve skills, technology and build more police infrastructure.
A broader strategy to improve policing should address problems of corruption in the police, particularly in bringing prosecutions — the widespread problem of missing dockets should be dealt with urgently. In addition, appropriate, standardised training should be undertaken to build a professional, effective and accountable force capable of combating serious crime.
New forensic science facilities are required to eliminate the police’s estimated 23 000 sample backlog. Improved witness protection represents another important demand. Furthermore, the police should be taught improved methods of crowd control. The maintenance of public order is a sensitive operational area and an unchecked militarisation of the police could be viewed as an effective declaration of war by the government against its citizens.
Meanwhile, the new militarisation of the police may prove less than welcome at the regional level. The SAPS is contributing personnel to the police component of the Southern African Development Community’s (SADC) Brigade, which forms part of a new African Standby Force being established to conduct peacekeeping operations on the continent.
The problem here is that contingents drawn from a police force guided by a military ethos could find it difficult to fit in with more civilian-oriented police services in the regional peacekeeping architecture. Similar issues could arise at the region’s main cross-border anti-crime body — the Southern African Regional Police Chiefs Cooperation Organisation. When “General” Cele adopts a military pose and issues orders there, the top police officers from, say, Zimbabwe, Angola, or Mozambique, may feel little inclination to click their heels and jump to it.
Dr Gwinyayi Dzinesa is a senior researcher at the Centre for Conflict Resolution in Cape Town