Shoot to Kill

Christoper McMichael

Description

Shoot to Kill: Police and Power in South Africa is a vivid and ambitious survey
of the complex politics of security, crime and social control in South Africa.
Nearly three decades after the formal end of apartheid, policing in South
Africa continues to be defined by brutality, incompetence and corruption.
Featuring unapologetic critiques of elite power and the stifling politics of fear,
while informed by global discussions on police abolition, Shoot to Kill: Police and
Power in South Africa calls for a society based on democracy and justice.
Author Christopher McMichael speaks to the realities of our world
increasingly defined by militarised injustice and outlines ways we
can escape from this rusty cage.

Sujets

• Political Science
• Histoire
• Theory
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Digital On Demand
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 4
• EAN13: 9781776378814
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Shoot to Kill: Police and Power in South Africa
Christopher McMichael




All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, or by any other information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.
This edition published August 2022
ISBN 978-1-77637-881-4
© Christopher McMichael, 2022
Edited by Efemia Chela
Design by Ryan Honeyball
Inkani Books
2nd Floor, South Point Corner,
87 De Korte Street
Braamfontein,
Johannesburg,
South Africa,
2001
Inkani Books is the publishing division of The Tricontinental Pan Africa NPC
inkanibooks.co.za


Contents
What are the Police For?
LAW AND DISORDER
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
POLICE AGAINST DEMOCRACY
The Inhuman Frontier: The Colonial Origins of Policing
THE BAASKAP SOCIETY
THE NEO-COLONIAL NOW
Policing Segregation and Capitalism (1800–1948)
NEW MASTERS AND THE IMPERIAL PANOPTICON
ENFORCING CAPITALISM
FASCIST INFLUENCE
Empire of Crime: The Apartheid Police
RED MENACE
CAPTIVE STATE
HAPPINESS IS A CONFIRMED KILL
The Next War: Police Since 1994
BORN IN FLAME
HARD CASES
PREDATOR STATE
SPIDERWEBS
Have Gun, Will Travel: Non-State Policing and Private Violence
DEVIL AT THE GATE
PRIVATE POWER
HIGHWAY OF DEATH
AWAKE AT NIGHT
An Injury to One is an Injury to All: Alternatives and Possibilities
OBEDIENCE OR JUSTICE?
MILITARISED IMAGINATIONS
ABOLITIONIST FUTURES
ACHIEVING TRUE SAFETY
ENDNOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY


CHAPTER ONE
What are the Police For?
On the night of 26 August 2020, 16-year-old Nateniel Julies went to a spaza shop next to his family’s apartment in Eldorado Park, Johannesburg, to buy some biscuits as a snack. The young boy, who had a severe intellectual disability, was well known in his area for his personal charm, and his love of biscuits. The shop owner who he bought it from remembered him fondly, ‘I could see that he was a special child, he can’t speak properly … Always no trouble, he was a good boy.’ 1
But as he left the shop, he was confronted by the South African Police Service (SAPS), who were supposedly conducting an anti-gang operation in the lower income area. According to witnesses, Julies was unable to answer the officers’ questions. After the questioning, Sergeant Simon ‘Scorpion’ Ndyalvane retrieved a pump action shotgun and blasted Julies at close range, killing him instantly.
In the subsequent criminal trial, it was alleged that the officers tried to cover up this brutal act of senseless aggression, by lying that the boy had died in crossfire with armed gangs. This fabrication was repeated by Gauteng Premier David Makhura. He claimed that Julies’ death was collateral damage in the SAPS war on crime, stating he ‘was allegedly killed during a shoot-out with members of the SAPS following a tip-off about stolen car parts.’ This was rejected by the community, for whom the killing catalysed long-standing grievances with the Eldorado Park police station. After they marched to the police station to demand justice and accountability, the police responded with more violence.
The Hillbrow Flats, where Julies had lived with his family, was riddled with teargas and rubber bullets, leading to more children being injured. Between 2012 to 2018 alone, according to figures from police accountability monitor Viewfinder, 39 children were killed by police in South Africa. There were almost no convictions for these cases. One officer was allowed off with a mere verbal warning after fatally shooting an unarmed teenager in the back .2
The killing of Nateniel Julies is part of a wider pattern of SAPS violence against the unarmed public. In January 2021, the government chose not to renew temporary disability grants, meaning that impoverished and physically challenged recipients were forced to wait in long queues at Department of Social Development offices. At the Belville, Western Cape branch, the police decided that crowds were not adhering to social distancing regulations and attacked them with powerful water cannons.
In March of the same year, 35-year-old housing planner and father of four, Mthokozisi Ntumba was leaving a doctor’s office in Braamfontein, one of the busiest pedestrian areas in Johannesburg. At nearby Wits University, SAPS officers in Nyala armoured vehicles had been firing rubber bullets at protesting students. Despite the crowds in Braamfontein not being involved in the demonstration eyewitnesses reported that officers were driving into the area and indiscriminately firing at passersby. As he walked around the corner, Ntumba was struck with bullets. He asked, ‘What is happening? Why am I being shot,’ before being killed by a close-range shot.
The regular occurrences of police violence mean that SAPS is both feared and resented by many of the communities they are ostensibly supposed to protect from crime and harm. As one of the protesters told the media after the death of Nateniel Julies, ‘The most organised gangsters here in Eldorado Park are the South African police.’ 3
LAW AND DISORDER
Both of these incidents, and the states response to public outcry about them, show the underlying logic which structures police power and how it is enforced in daily life. For one, extreme violence, from the use of shotguns to driving military-grade armoured vehicles in densely populated urban spaces, is justified in the name of defending the law. Officers have the right to use intense coercion and lethal force, to protect society from dangerous and armed lawbreakers, such as gangs or car robbers. But along with enforcing the law comes the more nebulous category of order. In the eyes of the state, any perceived insolence or insubordination from its subjects is viewed as potential risk that requires immediate police intervention.
We may not view a 16-year-old with developmental difficulties as any kind of threat to social stability, but from the police’s perspective, by not answering questions, Nateniel Julies made himself a suspect. He was marked as a potential criminal. While police are trained to view citizens with suspicion, they reserve the right to use harsh reprisals to defend ‘law and order’. To us, peppering an occupied apartment building with rubber bullets and teargas may not seem a constructive approach to dealing with the Eldorado Park community’s grievances with SAPS. However, the state views the disorder of its own citizens as a prelude to even worse destabilisation. Violence is crucial to uphold social stability. Unlike the violence or crime perpetrated by individuals, government coercion is regarded as law-making and constructive, even when this entails brutal force or blatant illegality. As an unnamed military major from the United States of America told the press after the Vietnamese city of Ben Tre was levelled with rockets and napalm in 1968, ‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.’
This violence is not applied indiscriminately, but reflects wider class, racial and gender power structures. Because Nateniel Julies’ neighbourhood was seen as impoverished, officers were trained to view him as potentially dangerous, compounded by his status as a Coloured South African. The comedian Dillan Oliphant identified this dehumanising logic in the days after the shooting, arguing that:
They dropped his body at the hospital saying he was involved with gang activities knowing very well that he’s a coloured and that narrative will easily be eaten up by people who only see him as that … They saw a suspect, a threat, a gangster, a life they could silence and invalidate … Not someone’s child, a loved one, a human being. 4
The idea that certain people or spaces are less valuable directly fuels police brutality. Take the reckless way the officers who killed Mthokozisi Ntumba were shooting into pedestrian crowds that were not even involved in the protests they were policing. Such tactics show a complete disregard for basic human rights and public safety. If anyone other than a uniformed state official acted in such a destructive way, they would be considered a criminal and a menace. But police violence is legitimated because they are seen to perform an indispensable public service.
According to the police and governments, along with much of the media and academia, police are ‘the thin blue line’, who not only punish lawbreakers but uphold social order itself. Without police, or private security, society runs the risk of tipping over into chaos and lawlessness because there would be no institution capable of enforcing laws, regulating conflicts or controlling violent crowds and public disturbances. The corollary of this is that police violence or brutality serve a utilitarian or useful purpose. Even if individual incidents, like the death of innocent bystanders, may be deplorable or avoidable, the cumulative impact of allowing officers to violently enforce the law is ultimately positive. It is seen as far less destructive than the alternative of unrestricted disorder.
This argument has a clear appeal, especially in a society with a high level of crime like ours, as no reasonable person would want to be left helpless to attack, assault, theft or abuse. The idea that the police are there to fight crime, and uphold order, seems common-sense. The police, from this perspective, are a fundamental institution, indispensable for any modern society, and as essential as healthcare or sanitation. The police in parliamentary democracies should ideally be public servants, whose role is to protect and serve the public, and to enforce laws and regulations without favour and bias.
However, across the world, pol