Volume 9 Number 3 1996
Policing for a New South Africa, Mike Brogden and Clifford Shearing, Routledge, 1993, 234 pages, £37.50 hardback, £12.99 paperback.
Policing in South Africa commands our attention for three important reasons: first, it is a policing horror story whose brutal authoritarian racism needs comprehensive condemnation. Secondly, it is part of a quite explicit experiment in state formation which hopefully will soon slide into history, but whose effects need careful assessment before it disappears from view, lest we fail to learn its lessons. Thirdly, reforming the policing of South Africa provides a fertile arena for competing visions of what policing a democracy should mean. Brogden and Shearing provide us with a massively significant contribution in all three respects. It is a book that deserves reading not only by those interested in policing in South Africa but by those interested in policing per se, by students of colonialism as a chapter of modern history, and by anyone with an interest in freedom, democracy and human dignity.
The book is divided into two parts. In the first, the authors lead us through the awful catalogue of state repression that is the history of the South African Police (SAP) and its various appendages. The authors convincingly argue that the SAP was the unalloyed creature of apartheid. SAP officers were brutally repressive because that was what the apartheid state demanded of them. Their brutal repression was systematically condoned by the state which, under the State of Emergency, went so far as to offer a general indemnity to any officer acting in 'good faith'.
The second part of the book concerns itself with proposals for reform. The authors are rightly sceptical of attempts by liberal democracies to export their own models of policing to a New South Africa. South Africa must start from where it now finds itself, which includes the legacy of apartheid and resistance to it. Part of that resistance, the authors argue, lies in methods of maintaining order in the townships which served as an alternative to the institutions of apartheid. These include 'people's courts', 'self defence units' and 'street committees' which distributed local justice by local people. Just as the rich and powerful in South Africa (and elsewhere) have purchased the additional security the state police cannot provide, so the poor and oppressed have established their own do-it-yourself equivalents. The authors believe that this tradition can be built upon for the future (and implicitly that others in the liberal democracies might vicariously learn from that experience). Their aim is to provide a system of security which is genuinely owned by local people and which the state police serve, rather than dominate. It is noble vision and one that deserves serious consideration.
I have three reservations about the thesis contained in the book and the proposals to which it leads. The first is conceptual: throughout the book the authors distinguish between state and alternative methods of policing. They note, in particular, the growth of private security as an additional tier of policing and suggest that alternative methods of 'ordering' civil society may be more effective. They commend the approach of the 'international panel' which advised the Goldstone Commission on public order law and procedures, to which Cliff Shearing and I both contributed. This panel recommended that the maintenance of order at demonstrations should be regarded as the joint responsibility of local authorities, protest organisers and the police. Order is undoubtedly better maintained by a structure that facilitates peaceful protest, than by the attempt to intimidate protestors into quiescence or to suppress disorder by force. Certainly, there are many ways of maintaining order that do not involve the public police. Where I part company from the authors is in describing these alternatives as `policing'. Social scientists have long been aware that social behaviour is controlled by informal, often unacknowledged means. Indeed, this was one of the rationales for the development of the social sciences. There is undoubtedly also the danger that narrowly focused police research and policy ignores those wider control mechanisms and elevates policing to a pre-eminent position as a provider of order. The police in liberal societies have always been only one of many mechanisms for ordering society (and not necessarily the most important at that). Police rely upon or use these other mechanisms: for example, the policing of demonstrations is facilitated by the passage of traffic that helps to contain marchers. South Africans will need to recognise that order and security does not rest solely with the state police but on diverse foundations.
Indeed, South Africa supplies us with a test case, for apartheid installed a system of social control that permeated every corner of normal life and was, regretably, tremendously successful in effectively suppressing the vast majority of the population. When the apparently pointless restrictions of apartheid pass-laws, influx controls, 'immorality' laws and residential segregation broke down and/or were repealed, the whole edifice collapsed. Crime, which had once been largely contained within the townships, started to rocket even in previously all-white areas. A police force, armed to the teeth and backed by a draconian penal system, could not and did not prevent the virtual collapse of law and order. Homes in many white areas have now been transformed into small fortresses and the possession of guns is as common as the ownership of swimming pools in the Johannesburg suburbs. It is tempting to conclude that the apartheid state was a `police state', for the white population were coopted as its agents. Thus, it might be concluded that what is now required is to coopt the institutions of resistance to the achievement of a new and benign order. This, I accept: what I dispute is whether it can genuinely be described as 'policing'.
'Policing' is not co-terminus with the maintenance of 'order' and provision of 'security'. Policing is intrinsically a function of the state. 'Policing' cannot be privatised, because it is essentially a public state-provided service. 'Private police' are not 'police' at all, they are the agents of vested private interests for whom they provide security. Security guards might perform tasks that the police might otherwise perform, but that does not make them police officers any more than their providing first aid transforms them into ambulance staff or extinguishing fires turns them into fire-fighters.
This is of more than merely conceptual importance for the future of South Africa. The task that will confront the leadership of a New South Africa will be the transformation of the state, a key element of which is the transformation of the SAP. In directing their gaze to alternative indigenous non-police mechanisms of social control, the authors fail to recognise the full scale of this task, the obstacles that will need to be surmounted and the opportunities that may exist.
The immediate prospect that faces a democratic South Africa is one of turmoil and strife. This has been the fate of many, if not most, societies that have thrown off the yoke of repression. South Africa may buck the trend, but the auguries are not good. Many of the obstacles strewn across the path to multi-racial democracy are the legacy of apartheid. The townships themselves are like some grotesque experiment in Durkheimian anomie, and their murder rate is ample illustration of the strength of Durkheim's theory. The traditional African ordering mechanisms to which the authors rightly draw attention not only atrophied in such conditions, but were actively destroyed by the apartheid state, and the vacuum has been filled by gangsters and warlords in a country awash with weapons. The resistance to apartheid also bequeaths a legacy of opposition to any state intervention. The ANC tactic of making the townships ungovernable, which receives scant mention by the authors, bequeaths to the New South Africa a legacy of communities in which taxes have not been gathered for a decade or more - a habit that may be difficult to break. A generation of comrades `placed liberation before education' and are now incapable of reaping the harvest of freedom because of their unemployability. Add to this tribal, linguistic and religious divisions and rivalries, plus right-wing extremism and the picture looks bleak indeed.
In this context, the informal ordering mechanisms upon which the authors rest so much optimism not only seem to be dwarfed into insignificance, but may be part of the problem rather than part of the solution. In turmoil, 'people's courts', 'self defence units' and 'street committees' are likely to be swept aside. Worse still, they may be appropriated by factions promoting instability and insecurity. Democratic decision-making at local level is an attractive prospect, provided that township dwellers do not democratically decide to attack their neighbours in the hostels, or the next township, or vice versa. If they do, then the continued existence of the state itself may be placed in jeopardy, as it has been in Somalia, Bosnia, Lebanon and elsewhere. If the state is to survive and if ordinary people are to enjoy any measure of public security, then the state must be able to impose order. This is the crucial role that the police of the New South Africa may be called upon to play.
That the SAP has the capability to intervene forcefully is beyond doubt. But will it?. Of course, this is imponderable, but there is reason for hope. We are all aware of, and this book documents, the sickening violence perpetrated by the SAP. However, there is an oddity in the history of apartheid that offers a glimmer (and only a glimmer) of hope. States other than South Africa have resorted to the most awful barbarities to maintain power. Given that the South African authorities rightly perceived the scale of the threat to their continued dominance, what is surprising is not that they inflicted such suppression, but that they were so comparatively restrained. What the South African courts have condoned is appalling, but it is equally surprising that they have punished any police officers for any wrongdoing towards those who are imagined (often correctly) to have threatened the very existence of the state.
As the authors of this book are at pains to point out, the SAP were not a renegade police force, like the death squads of Latin and South America: they were a disciplined force acting under the direction of, and within the rules laid down by, the state itself. If that discipline can be maintained and transferred to the new democratic South Africa, then the SAP could become a formidable force for social and national reconstruction. The greatest obstacle to this is the undoubted commitment of SAP officers to the ideology of apartheid: that weird mixture of religious fundamentalism and naked racism, that Brogden and Shearing capture superbly.
But there is another strand that offers the opportunity for hope: apartheid presented itself as a bulwark of western democracy against communism. SAP officers compare themselves with their counterparts in the western liberal democracies and fondly imagine that they are bearers of the Peel tradition. If these elements of the ideology can be fostered, then it is just possible that the SAP can become a force for good and thus atone for the evils perpetrated under apartheid.
A far greater hurdle for the reform of the SAP lies in its legitimacy in the eyes of the non-white population. It symbolizes for them the oppression of the apartheid system, and some fundamental changes will be required if that symbolism is to be expunged. The dilemma that the new regime might well face is not being able to keep order without the SAP, whilst not being able to survive with it.
P.A.J. Waddington,
Director of Criminal Justice Studies,
University of Reading.
