south african police apartheid

It appeared, too, that the mafia boss had paid Selebi sums of money. This book is composed of excerpts from interviews with current and former members of the service who, for the first time, share their personal experiences of life behind the badge. Vorster quickly tightened South Africa’s security policies, instituting a virtual zero-tolerance approach to any resistance against the state and ensuring that the Security Branch of the South African Police acquired formidable powers. These were the bodies, most famously the eerily named Civil Cooperation Bureau, charged with treacherous and illegal aspects of counter-insurgency like targeted assassinations.50 But they were discreet and secretive and sealed off from the main body of the organization. Having a police force composed of criminals is a self-defeating exercise if one of the main objectives of the SAPS is to ensure that offenders are brought to justice. More specifically, it was two features of the environment – the first a broad-based liberation movement, housing a very diverse array of political complexions, but bound to stay together to keep an electoral majority. More important, for our purposes, is that within the NSMS establishment, the Security Police was assigned an important but decidedly subordinate position. Which relationship was activated moved in sync with a range of rhythms – time of day, density of crowds, private or public space, the preponderance of one gender over another among the civilians the police encountered. William J. Dixon, ‘Globalising the local: a genealogy of sector policing in South Africa’, International Relations21, 2 (2007), pp. (25) Ellis, M., ‘Police brutality: A threat to rights?’, iAfrica.com, 24 March 2014, http://news.iafrica.com. It has to be considered in the broader socioeconomic and political context in which the police force operates. The results were very alarming indeed. These forerunners of the modern-day SA Police were appointed as Wardmasters about the year 1790. (8) Ibid. Dariusz Dziewanski, a researcher and consultant in international development, stresses that “violence in South Africa is nothing new. They were considered to be robots rather than thinkers. Search for other works by this author on: © The Author 2014. The detective service was thus humbled and scorned; both its leaders and its rank-and-file understandably took the new course of events as an insult.30, A great deal thus changed in a short space of time. 507–20; Brodeur, The Policing Web (Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2010), pp. At the time, Selebi was heralded as South Africa's first black police chief. (23) ‘Understanding police brutality in South Africa: Challenges and solutions conference’, 11 April 2014, http://www.issafrica.org. Janine Rauch is an independent consultant. Although this graph shows a slight decrease from 2010 in levels of criminal cases against the police as well as police-related deaths, the figures still remain unreasonably high. Raphael Botiveau, ‘Briefing: The politics of Marikana and South Africa's changing labour relations’, African Affairs113, 450 (2014), pp. This trajectory in policing has provided much food for thought and scholars of the new South Africa have been feasting on the ironies.2 Why has the most reviled of apartheid's institutions been so very slow to die? Mass recruitment of police officers, while justifiable in the face of elevated levels of crime, should not result in the enlistment of poorly trained or unqualified officers. (27) Burger, J., ‘Understanding police brutality in South Africa: Challenges and solutions’, Institute for Security Studies, 11 April 2013, http://www.issafrica.org. The South African Police traces its origin to the Burgher Watch, also known as Burgher Wardmasters or Wijkmeesters (Dutch) as pointed out in an old Nongqai article, dated August 1938 - titled "FROM RATTLE WATCH TO BATONS". Nine provincial teams were formed in 2009, each with roughly a hundred members.52 And then, in February 2011, when the Teams were less than two years old, something odd and disturbing happened. In recent years, the South African Police Service (SAPS) has come under the spotlight due to the increasing number of incidents in which civilians have been assaulted or even killed by the police. Whereas during apartheid the police was primarily driven by the fight against insurgency, the police in democratic South Africa is primarily tasked with managing the conflicts of the ruling ANC. Found insideThis is a book about the men and women who police contemporary South Africa. When people demand policing, they quite literally pick up the phone and call for it. (22) Hosken, G., ‘Why SA cops are so brutal’, Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, 26 May 2011, http://www.csvr.org.za. Keywords: EMAIL THIS ARTICLE      SAVE THIS ARTICLE, To subscribe email subscriptions@creamermedia.co.za or click here (1) Gibson Ncube is a Research Associate with the Rights in Focus unit at CAI. FAQs The police's military rank structure was abolished and the name ‘Police Force’ was replaced with ‘Police Service’. For a brief exploration of how variegated and complex the history of uniformed policing in urban South Africa was see Jonny Steinberg, Thin Blue: The unwritten rules of policing South Africa (Jonathan Ball, Johannesburg, 2008), pp. It is hoped that this Act will play a central role in combating the brutality and impunity of the SAPS. John D. Brewer, Black and Blue: Policing in South Africa (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994), p. 2. , and if you can't find the answer there, please A new and dramatically abbreviated training regime saw the emergence of a much-maligned sort of policeman known in popular parlance as a kitskonstabel – an ‘instant constable’, a euphemism for a thug hastily dressed up in a uniform. With some exceptions, scholarship on post-apartheid policing has been too preoccupied by continuities with the apartheid era. The link was not copied. It was a police detachment, rather than the army, that was sent to Wankie in Rhodesia in 1967, the scene of Umkhonto we Sizwe's first armed initiative since the banning of the ANC.10 It was also the police that advocated for and designed South Africa's invasion of Angola in 1975, and that shaped South Africa's thinking in regard to the impending end to white rule in Rhodesia in the late 1970s.11 In part, the police dominated state security because the National Party government did not trust its Defence Force until deep into its reign. See especially Susan Booysen, The African National Congress and the Regeneration of Political Power (Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 2011). The violent service delivery protests that began in 2004 are complex phenomena; the crowds that form are socially diverse and harbour a range of interests, motives, and ideas.55 For all their complexity, though, many of these protests are organized by card-carrying ANC members, sometimes by office bearers, and many of those in the crowds vote for the ANC. In this light, the decision to deploy police trained to use maximum force begins to make some sense. Although …The suspicious details surroundin… Multiplicity and simultaneity in ethnographic research: Exploring the use of drones in Ghana, State aesthetics and state meanings: Political architecture in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, Urban renewal in Ibadan, Nigeria: World class but essentially Yoruba, Women’s rights and critical junctures in constitutional reform in Africa (1951–2019), Fighting fences and land grabbers in the struggle for the Commons in N≠a Jaqna, Namibia, The South African police in the age of counter-insurgency, Democracy and the ascendance of low policing, Political policing and uniformed policing, http://www.defenceweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8299:ill-conceived-police-restructuring-aided-crime-study&catid=3:Civil%20Security&Itemid=113, http://mampoer.co.za/david-bruce/24-marikana, Receive exclusive offers and updates from Oxford Academic, Copyright © 2021 Oxford University Press. There was something of an escalation of deaths in 2010: three people were killed by the police in protests that year. Tracing the expansion of South African business into other areas of Africa in the years after apartheid, Richard A. Schroeder explores why South Africans have not always made themselves welcome guests abroad. Illustrated with photographs, maps and figures and including a chronology of events, glossary and Who’s Who of key figures, this essential text provides students with a current, clear, and succinct introduction to the ideology and ... For a fine analysis, see Karl von Holdt et al., The Smoke That Calls: Insurgent citizenship, collective violence and the struggle for a place in the new South Africa (Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, Johannesburg, 2011). South African police officers are responsible for the deaths of civilians at almost twice the rate of police officers in the US. During a process of bureaucratic restructuring, the Tactical Response Teams found themselves under the police division responsible for public order policing. The “Josef Mengele of apartheid” was in jail, but “merely” on drug trafficking charges. The difference is profound and the implications ripple right to the edges of the police organization, fashioning the manner in which street life is policed and impinging on the functioning and the durability of the detective service. 3 The Colonial Subtext of British-Led Police Reform in Sierra Leone, 5 Historicising Vigilante Policing in Plateau State, Nigeria, 9 Risk and Motivation in Police Work in Nigeria, 13 Inside the Police Stations in Maputo City, 15 Soft Law Enforcement in the Nigerien Gendarmerie. You have one shot and it must be a kill shot.”(25) Such a controversial statement by a high-ranking minister is not only unfortunate, but can be seen as a catalyst in encouraging policemen to employ extreme violence and brutality. In this article I argue that what has changed most since the end of apartheid is the relationship between policing and political order. Specialized units were the institutions through which the police organization retained and passed on specialist knowledge. I want no warning shots. Firstly, it is evident that police have been known to use unnecessarily excessive force. Police brutality in South Africa has become a regular feature of police behavior in South Africa both before and during the coronavirus lockdown. This week a court in KwaZulu Natal has reopened the inquest into Haffejee’s death. Scholarship has yet to give an adequate account of these rhythms. The legal team representing former apartheid-era police officer, Joao Rodrigues, says they will await a directive from the Constitutional Court relating to the case against him. The police force provides a prime example of the violence that is so prevalent in South Africa. The table below shows the changing levels of reported cases between the 2011/12 and 2012/13 periods of review: Figure 2: Number of cases reported to the IPID (16). But a new relationship was nonetheless being forged. So it is all informal. 69–99. The will to police differently was very powerful indeed. You have a higher degree and you speak eloquently. Township residents, especially younger ones, were not very welcoming of a police presence, despite the new uniforms and the new language, and police often resorted to doing their work in large numbers and with aggression, especially on weekend evenings, in part as a measure of self-defence.33 It is also true that the organization was large and unwieldy, the skill base of the Uniformed Branch very poor; it was thus easiest, in Ted Leggett's inimitable phrase, to ‘herd police into large formations’ and aim them at civilians.34 It is also true that police leaders discovered, to their pleasant surprise, that many civilians, especially the residents of townships and shack settlements, took comfort in the spectacle of large paramilitary presence on the streets.35. Albeit in highly modified form because information gathered on organized crime is only useful if presentable as court evidence, and thus requires something of a reinvention of how information is gathered. 126–73. Crucially, he was both an outsider – he did not come through police ranks – and an ANC veteran who had lived much of his adult life in exile. His trial began shortly thereafter, but the proceedings were rushed. He points out: If we are to do away with police brutality, we need to start with the implementation of the recommendations of the National Development Plan, which are constructive and good. The ANC came to power at the end of April 1994. They knew that the organization would soon have new political masters, but were not sure whether these masters would even tolerate their presence. You raise your eyebrows because x is a household name, a heavy-hitter in public life. The South African Police was the national police force and law enforcement agency in South Africa from 1913 to 1994; it was the de facto police force in the territory of South West Africa from 1939 to 1981. UPDATED: 8:30 a.m. Just as exercising discretion about whom to investigate for corruption becomes a mode of managing the ruling party, so the question of which protests to quell with violence becomes a weapon mobilized in intra-party conflict. At the centre of Botha's security strategy was a previously moribund interdepartmental bureaucracy called the National Security Management System (NSMS) accountable to a high-level body called the State Security Council. Dr. Peter Magubane/Courtesy International Center of Photography The Rise and Fall of Apartheid Just bring him down.’ You find that the people working with you on the case are from other units. But it is worth noting that we are only 20 years into the new order, and that the new relationship between political order policing that began to take shape in the mid-1990s is still young, many of its manifestations and consequences still dormant. From the photos emerges the afterlife of apartheid, as Dlamini tells the story of former insurgents, collaborators, and police. Originally published: Jan. 28, 2013. But the purposes for which it used high policing were radically different from those of its apartheid predecessor – the ruling party began to use the organs of high policing primarily to police itself. (10) Van Graan, M., ‘The A to Z of things we cannot blame on apartheid’, The Mail and Guardian, 13 January 2014, http://www.thoughtleader.co.za. In a wide-ranging restructuring exercise announced in 2004, Selebi decided to disband the entire slew of specialized units in which much of the detective service investigated crime.43 Members from these units would be dispersed to police stations across the country. In the last decade, there has been a massive drive to expand the police force. When Jackie Selebi was appointed police commissioner in 2000 I was a senior writer at the national daily, Business Day, covering, among other areas, the criminal justice system. Found insideWeaving together archival material, interviews and newly declassified documents, Apartheid Guns and Money exposes some of the darkest secrets of apartheid's economic crimes, their murderous consequences, and those who profited: heads of ... Such statistics have led Burger and Cyril Adonis (Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation) to author a report whose title likens the independent investigative directorate to a “watchdog without teeth.”(19) Reiterating this same point in an interview on the programme South 2 North on Al-Jazeera, Redi Tlabi pointed out to Commissioner of Police Riah Phiyega that the IPID might not be as effective as the legislation that led to its creation. But it had returned in such a different form and with such different consequences. One is by Paul Erasmus, a secret policeman under South Africa’s brutal, racist apartheid regime. And once again, they seem to have protected Kenyans from the self-serving machinations of the political elite. According to prosecutors, she was an underground operative for the African National Congress, the main anti-apartheid group, which became South Africa's ruling party in 1994. Annette Seegers, ‘South Africa's National Security Management System, 1972–1990,’ Journal of Modern African Studies29, 2 (1991), pp. If the post-apartheid South African state is to function, then it will need to subjugate those forces pulling towards fragmentation. While this is understandable, it has blinded scholars to profound changes. The … In 2000 8, 36% of officials were female; today we stand at 20, 38%. On Sept. 12, 1977, Stephen Biko, one of South Africa’s most influential anti-apartheid activists, died after being beaten by South African police during an interrogation. For the question of whom criminal justice agencies went after and whom they left alone became critical to determining who would control the ANC in the near future. The cases previously mentioned on police brutality illustrate that law enforcement agents act, in many instances, in a manner that disrespects human rights and dignity. Both the devastating effects of violence, and the risk factors underlying it, have existed before…and will continue to exist.”(5) The official crime statistics for 2012/13 prepared by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) show that there has been a steady increase in violent crimes in South Africa. We spoke to the CEOs of the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation — Sello Hatang and Neeshan Balton — about non-racialism, racial justice, and what it takes to honestly confront systemic racism. 215–41; Mike Brogden, ‘“Horses for courses” and “thin blue lines”: community policing in transitional society’, Police Quarterly8, 1 (2005), pp. The NIA was permitted to do so because it was tightly under his control. . Egon Bittner, ‘Florence Nightingale in pursuit of Willie Sutton: a theory of the police’ in Egon Bittner (ed. The material constitutes something of a running commentary on Selebi's early days, as reported from the inside. But the question of which instruments from the old survive and how they are modified is the crucial one. He was tied onto the back of a police vehicle and dragged around the township of Daveyton in full view of local residents. In 1999, Mbeki gave the green light to the establishment of a powerful investigative agency in the Justice Department under the authority of the national director of public prosecutions, but only after he had thoroughly reformed the prosecution service, ridding it of its federal structure, centralizing authority in the national director, and appointing a trusted client to this position. Leggett, ‘The state of crime’, p. 231. This means that just 1.2% of criminal cases opened against law enforcement officials during that time resulted in a conviction. The current culture of brutality and impunity that characterises its operations is not only unsustainable but also self-defeating, given that the primary duties of the police are to stamp out all forms of crime and protect the public. In the democratic era, the structure of the police force, its culture, and its spirit are increasingly shaped by the task of managing conflict in the ruling party. Whites did. To advertise email advertising@creamermedia.co.za or click here, The courts have intervened decisively in the country’s turbulent and ethnically charged politics. The AAM grew out of ongoing resistance movements and the efforts of many within South Africa and the international community to end racial inequality and the oppressive policies of enforced racial segregation in Your responsibility is to serve and protect. Across the country, crowds would periodically gather, their grievances usually concerning housing shortfalls, or the delivery of utilities or local government corruption, and set fire to or damage government property. 64–98; Jonny Steinberg, ‘Crime prevention goes abroad: policy transfer and policing in post-apartheid South Africa’, Theoretical Criminology15, 4 (2011), pp. separate emails by commas, maximum limit of 4 addresses, 23rd May 2014 See, famously, David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and social order in contemporary society (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001). For one thing, Botha had spent the past several years as Minister of Defence and had finally built a trusted, Afrikaans-speaking, Nationalist-supporting officer corps. Units were the institutions through which an organization gathers and retains knowledge these two factors make the policing south african police apartheid... Thank you for submitting a comment on this article I argue that what has most. Actively used criminal gangs to disrupt the institutions through which an organization gathers and retains.! Cog in this article I argue that what has changed Roos, former Security policeman, August... The state 's legal institutions and police Brodeur 's terms, the Branch! Contact us under a racist apartheid regime story of former insurgents, collaborators, and police responded test the!, 2007 ), Aspects of police brutality in South Africa possesses enormous reserves of mineral and! Current browser may not support copying via this button was very powerful indeed conduct of the modern-day south african police apartheid... Now on, the Mississippi of South African authorities claimed that Mr. Biko’s hunger caused... Eradicating police brutality in South African authorities claimed that Mr. Biko’s hunger caused... Or are actively destroyed of officials were female ; today we stand at alarming levels approximately 44,000 people about... 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