A story reported last week by News24 is so perverse that I had to read it twice before taking it in.
On a Sunday afternoon in late November three police officers arrived at a private home in Benoni, gained entrance on the grounds that they were on official police business, then kidnapped one of the occupants.
After a bizarre string of events involving attempted robbery and extortion, they held her hostage for four hours and forced her family to withdraw R20,000 from an ATM.
The story triggered a memory. Years ago I spent several months riding along with police patrols as a researcher. The range extended from weekday patrols in the middle-class suburbs, where nothing seemed ever to happen, to Friday nights in Alexandra township, where everything imaginable happened. It was an extraordinary way to experience my country.
For some reason last week’s news story brought to mind one of these patrols. It was a night shift, 6pm to 6am, in a town on the periphery of Greater Johannesburg. The first call of the evening was to a home in the town’s coloured township.
I don’t recall now the nature of the complaint, but I do remember that the complainants spoke to the police officers in Afrikaans and they kept replying in Setswana. After we left I asked the officers why they would not conduct the conversation in the complainants’ language. “That family is black,” one of them told me. “They have been trying to pass for coloured since their grandparents’ time.”
I wondered how on earth it came to be that without deliberate intent an institution reversed its statutory function, which was to bring order to an unstable world, and instead made it a little less inhabitable.
The second call of the evening was from a woman who complained that her husband was threatening to beat her. The officers questioned her for a few minutes, spoke briefly to her husband, then marched her to their van, threw her in the back and took her to the holding cells at the police station.
“We assessed the situation and came to the conclusion that she had made a false complaint”, one of the officers explained. “She wanted to use us to hurt her husband. So we’re teaching her a lesson.”
Quite a lot happened over the course of the night. Much of it involved hauling young men the officers deemed to be drunk off the streets and into the police cells. As dawn was breaking, we stopped at a 24-hour takeout for coffee. It was the officers’ regular winding-down ritual, I learnt.
A man approached as we drank; he lived a block away and had a tenant in his garden flat who refused to pay rent. Would the officers help? They looked at their watches, then at each other. “What’s her name?” one of them asked. “Gladys,” the man replied.
Five minutes later, the officers were breaking down Gladys’ door, hauling her and her boyfriend, both half-naked, into the garden, and threatening mayhem if she did not pay her landlord. Satisfied that they had frightened the wits out of her, they left.
As I drove home that morning it occurred to me that over the past 12 hours the officers I was with had added no value to the world; they had just subtracted from it. Every social tension they came across — between black and coloured people, between a man and a woman, between a landlord and his tenant — they scratched open and bled. It was as if their job was to spend the night hunting every conceivable strain in their society and making it a little worse.
That is why last week’s news story brought back this old memory. The two officers with whom I spent the shift did not literally kidnap or extort people. At least while I was with them, they took no money from anyone. But they did steal nonetheless, even if what they stole was as intangible as a piece of their country’s spirit.
I wondered how on earth it came to be that without deliberate intent an institution reversed its statutory function, which was to bring order to an unstable world, and instead made it a little less inhabitable.
The SA Police Service is a wreckage, a national scandal. With each passing year it makes life a little harder.
• Steinberg teaches at Yale University’s Council on African Studies.
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