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Dear President Ramaphosa,
I know you will be overwhelmed with advice and suggestions as you settle into your new position. This country has been so comprehensively damaged in the last twenty years that it will be very hard to isolate what you need to focus on first. And there are so many worthy causes pleading for renewal and refurbishment, such as education, health and social services.
I want to make my own plea:
Please put fixing the South African Police Service, the National Prosecuting Authority and the criminal justice system as a whole at or very near the top of your list. Please.
It is almost impossible to achieve anything in a country where the police and their prosecutorial partners are so distrusted and compromised. I know this is asking you to cleanse the Augean stables, to take on a service which is riddled with incompetence and corruption from top to bottom, but it is critical.
You cannot root out the evils that have grown within other services without the right digging tools: credible investigation by trustworthy officers, arrest and prosecution.
Of course there’s this necessary qualification, recited by rote every time someone writes about the police in South Africa: there are good policemen and -women, people who feel they have a vocation, who battle to achieve their mandate against the odds.
But their presence is overwhelmed by the rot that can be smelt throughout the service. I feel desperately sad for them; it’s been 18 years since any of them served under a police commissioner who was not guilty of some form of misconduct.
Just a cursory read of attorney Sarah-Jane Trent’s sworn statement last year gives an idea of the devastation of the criminal justice system at the highest levels: “Put simply, South Africa has been stolen and sold to the highest corrupt bidder and, in order to cover their tracks, (and prevent being caught and jailed) the criminals have procured the infiltration of the criminal justice system, so that the criminals can go unpunished, and those exposing the corruption can be unlawfully attacked, intimidated and harassed, with the worst victims even being subjected to kidnapping and torture.”
The most vulnerable suffer the most
Terrible as this is, it’s not at those heights that the most significant suffering is caused by the implosion of trust in the criminal justice system. It’s not in the suburbs, either, although heaven knows people from the ‘burbs have tales to tell of poor service from police and the justice system.
It’s in communities that are on the business end of deprivation, the ones that are already so vulnerable because of joblessness, poor nutrition, poor resources, poor education.
I engage regularly with seriously disadvantaged communities – the people who have truly been shafted by the Zuma/Gupta axis of greed and corruption – and they would rather call on anyone else for help than the police (hence the popularity of ghastly vigilante justice).
They are afraid of the police, because their experience of police officers is shockingly bad.
I think of a desperate community of women and girls, in which it is rare to meet a woman who has not been raped, marching to protest their terrible vulnerability, and being met with what I can only call indifference. I think of a woman I know who was brutally raped in her own shack by a man she sees regularly in the streets of her township.
I think of the zama-zamas who operate without fear, in the open – because the police have been bought off. I think of the senior officer who admitted he knew that his police officers were being bribed, by drug dealers and criminals of various stripes as well as zama-zamas. I think of the police who do not follow up on complaints simply because they are ignorant of the law.
Drowning in nyaope
Crime has these communities by the throat, in a very real and palpable way. It’s a sickening feeling to look at the children playing in the streets and know that so many of the little girls will be (are already) vulnerable to sexual assault and many of the boys will be sucked into criminal activity – like the small, slender 12-year-old who reminded me of a young impala, big brown eyes and all, but who was already beginning to drown in nyaope, and committing crimes to finance his need.
Remember the police Bill Bryson encountered in Copenhagen, dealing with a drugged-up youngster? “The police officers helped the boy to his feet and led him to the patrol car. […] I had never seen such gentle police. At the patrol car, I said in English to the female officer, ‘Excuse me, what will you do with the boy?’
" 'We’ll take him home,’ she said simply, then raised her eyebrows a fraction and added: ‘I think he needs his bed'."
My young impala was badly beaten up by the police he encountered, despite his achingly vulnerable youth.
So try to imagine that scene in South Africa. Imagine hard, Sir; imagine… and then get to work, until a better world and a better, more just justice system comes into being, here, in this wonderful country.
Our people deserve at least a taste of a world where the police are on their side, not the enemy, in thrall to a criminal or corrupt clique that preys on them.
- Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter.
