Police violence begets only more violence
When police shot and killed bands of criminals in various parts of KwaZulu-Natal, members of the community, at their wits’ end because of the terror unleashed by these small-town gangs, cheered them on.
It is the reaction of people given neither to worshipping gangsters nor condoning summary executions. The cheers come from a place of hurt, from communities long subjected to localised violence and intimidation, including robberies, thefts, assaults, rapes, murders, break-ins and extortions. These are lives that can only be described as hell on earth.
Much of this criminality is perpetrated by young people barely out of their teens, but whose consciences have long escaped them. They have become brutal, not because they are inherently violent, but because they have seen the power their easily obtained guns bestow on them.
The police have belatedly decided to meet fire with fire and, assisted by intelligence agencies, have wiped out several gangs — to ululations from a weary public.
The latest such incident is the police killing of nine gang members in Mariannhill, KwaZuluNatal, this week. TimesLIVE reported police minister Bheki Cele saying the gang in question was linked to 26 criminal cases in the area, including 23 house robberies, murder, rape and attempted murder. The gang is also alleged to have raped a 24-year-old in front of her mother. Several neighbours of the criminals’ den left their homes to escape the regular effrontery. The mother of the woman raped later told TimesLIVE she was relieved her daughter’s assailants no longer walked the earth.
The shoot-out that left nine dead follows a police killing of three others in Eshowe, on the
KZN North Coast. Meanwhile, in Clermont, a cop killer was summarily shot dead by police a week ago. Another incident involved the killing of four men in Cato Manor by the KZN provincial stabilisation team. In total, more than 50 people have been killed in shoot-outs with the police in
KZN alone since October last year. Since January, the number is 24. In return, the police get high praise from the éminence grise of the police, Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, the KZN police commissioner, and the hawkish Cele, who said after the killing in Mariannhill: “We support the police, and the police have done what they were supposed to do to protect themselves and the community around here. Police in this province and nationally are on top of the situation, and we will continue to work that way.”
While the elimination of suspects seems to get tacit community approval and applause from Cele, it also seems regularised and frequent, subverting the normal criminal justice process. The public never gets to find out if all those killed were indeed guilty of the crimes associated with them. Even if they were, questions will still linger about whether they deserved what seem to be summary executions.
The question on many people’s minds is: Have the police become trigger-happy? Are they, in addition to being investigators, now also prosecutors, judges and hangmen all at the same time? Can the violence they unleash against violent gangs be deemed justice?
But first, why are the police forced to react with violence? A possible answer is that our country’s history is steeped in hair-raising violence.
When the history of the Zulu people is told, for example, they are portrayed as a bloodthirsty, spear-wielding people given to fighting at the slightest provocation. But this violence is neither a KZN nor a black problem it’s a South African problem. Further, if you look at violence through a political lens, race and borders become meaningless. The very history of colonialism is one of violence. British conquests involved malevolent violence. The violence we mete out against each other knows no bounds.
At the height of apartheid, white men hunted freedom fighters with astonishing barbarism. Even askari Joe Mamasela said “the most brutal thing I have ever witnessed” was police officer Gert Beeslaar squeezing freedom fighter Champion Galela’s testicles until they became the size of golf balls, and then punching them, killing the member of the Pebco Three. Even those who yearned for freedom and democracy used tyres and petrol to burn informers. There was no just process or careful analysis of evidence.
The dawn of democracy was meant to help create an environment that encouraged justice to take root. But, given its slow pace, some began to use guns to eliminate each other.
In a 2017 research document for the World
Bank Group titled The Socio-Economic Determinants of Crime in South Africa: An Empirical Assessment, researchers Haroon Bhorat, Adaiah Lilenstein, Jabulile Monnakgotla, Amy Thornton and Kirsten van der Zee say socioeconomic challenges are significant determinants of crime. Homelessness and food poverty are themselves forms of violence that drive people to extremes.
Many of those who commit crime are not poor. But there’s no gainsaying that poverty and hopelessness generate a fair share of gun-toting hoodlums.
But they do graduate, as it were, to more organised forms of violence from which they feed their insatiable greed. They rob, rape and extort. Those who bomb cash-in-transit vehicles, for example, aren’t without means.
Some spend their money, not at local shebeens, but rather at five-star hotels. The police exchange of firepower with Nkululeko Mkhize at the luxurious Zimbali Estate in Ballito is a case in point.
When criminals start behaving like Mkhize, they’re not motivated by poverty or need.
But the question remains: Are our cops triggerhappy, or have they now merely been emboldened to take the war to those who have been terrorising community members for years and do not think twice about killing cops?
Cele says the police “are not just trigger-happy to shoot anybody”. He points out that “Ipid will report when they finish their report, and I will not pre-empt what their report [on the Mariannhill killings] will say”.
But the father of one of the men killed in Mariannhill believes otherwise. “My son, Andile, and his associates had visited my house here. I got a call [while I was away because of work] that everyone in the house had been killed. It would have been better if they had been arrested because, to my knowledge, they were not fighting, but were just shot by the police.”
The current approach, in terms of which police simply kill everyone they come across, seems patently wrong and runs counter to the constitutional right to life. In addition, police brutality will simply spawn new gangs. This means Mkhwanazi and his killer cops must keep on killing — to the ululations of those tired of crime — but the problem won’t go away.
Crime — both petty and organised — is a consequence of society’s dysfunction and an unwelcome byproduct of our past. It is as much about failed parenting as it is about a failing economy that continues to marginalise the youth, turning them into petty criminals who steal to survive until some of them, like Mkhize and others, become captive to their greed.
Expecting the police to resolve crime without a concomitant focus on socioeconomic factors is to kick the can down the road and hope for the best. Einstein called it insanity.