: Jonny Steinberg
: Thin Blue The Unwritten Rules Of Policing South Africa
: Jonathan Ball
: 9781868424115
: 1
: CHF 7.20
:
: Sozialwissenschaften allgemein
: English
: 300
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
A country is policed only to the extent that it consents to be. When that consent is withheld, cops either negotiate or withdraw. Once they do this, however, they are no longer police; their role becomes something far murkier. Several months before they exploded into xenophobic violence, Jonny Steinberg travelled the streets of Alexandra, Reiger Park and other Johannesburg townships with police patrols. His mission was to discover the unwritten rules of engagement emerging between South Africa's citizens and its new police force. In this provocative new book, Steinberg argues that policing in crowded urban space is like theatre. Only here, the audience writes the script, and if the police don't perform the right lines, the spectators throw them off the stage. In vivid and eloquent prose, Steinberg takes us into the heart of this drama, and picks apart the rules South Africans have established for the policing of their communities. What emerges is a lucid and original account of a much larger matter: the relationship between ordinary South Africans and the government they have elected to rule them. The government and its people are like scorned lovers, Steinberg argues: their relationship, brittle, moody, untrusting and ultimately very needy.

The bluff


Another weekend night patrol, this one three years after Constables K and N’s debacle, and about 45 kilometres northeast of Toekomsrus. I am in Alexandra township in northern Johannesburg, among the oldest black residential spaces on the Reef, and undoubtedly the most densely populated.

The police officers along with whom I am riding this evening are Inspector L and Sergeant Z. Both have been working in Alexandra for more than 15 years. They have before them a patrol plan. Hour by hour, it tells them what they should be doing from the moment they hit the streets at 7 pm until they knock off at seven the following morning. The plan was generated by Alexandra police station’s Crime Information and Analysis Centre, which is equipped with some of the finest crime-mapping software available anywhere in the world. Each day, it imbibes a great batch of data detailing every crime reported in Alexandra in the last 24 hours, and every afternoon it spews out the station’s patrol plans based on its analysis of the current distribution of crime.

The police can do wonderful things with the sort of software they have in Alexandra. One can, for instance, feed the computer a simple epidemiological description of all 89 murders committed in Alex over the preceding year, and the computer will produce an extraordinary analysis for you. It will tell you how murder is distributed between informal settlements, hostels and formal housing; between lit areas and unlit areas; indoors and out; before midnight and after midnight; in summer and in winter, around Christmas and during Easter; whether murders predominate in the vicinity of shebeens, and if so in shebeens where Zimbabweans drink or where South Africans drink; whether in neighbourhoods near the highway or near the river; in areas inhabited predominantly by old Alex families or by newcomers. If you know Alex well and you study the data for ten or fifteen minutes, you will have a pretty sound knowledge of the most important situational triggers of violent death in your jurisdiction.

Tonight the software has been used to shape Inspector L and Sergeant Z’s patrol plan, and they treat it as sacrosanct. They pore over it for some time, make copies of it, file some of the copies, and slip others into their notebooks. They give me a copy, explain that it is a map of what we are going to be doing for the next 12 hours, and advise that I study it. It says that between 19h15 and 21h00, Inspector L and Sergeant Z will conduct vehicle patrols in Sectors One and Two of the Alex police jurisdiction; between 21h00 and 23h00 they will join other patrols to do a cordon-and-search operation at Ghanda Centre and the old Council Building, searching in particular for stolen goods, firearms and drugs; between 23h00 and 01h00, they will stop and search pedestrians for firearms and stolen goods between London and Rooth Roads; between 01h00 and 03h00 they will visit Millie’s Tavern and Pat’s Tavern on the East Bank, as well as Alex Club and Capert House on First Avenue, to enforce the regulation that drinking establishments close at 01h00.

‘Do you stick to this plan religiously?’ I ask Inspector L.

‘Not quite,’ he replies. ‘We get a lot of domestic violence calls on a Friday night, and we must respond to them. But when we are not responding to calls, we stick with the plan.’

We do not stick with the plan. Our movement over the course of the night follows a tight, easily discernable logic, but it has nothing to do with what the computer has generated. Inspector L and Sergeant Z know that very well from