Damned If You Shoot, Damned If You Don't

If you shoot, especially too accurately, we’ll condemn you as ‘trigger happy’ or even call you a ‘death squad’. If you exercise restraint, we’ll call you incompetent, cowardly or corrupt. Face it, dear police officers, in the war against crime and for our hearts and minds you will always lose.  Makes you wonder why bother, doesn’t it?

I speak to you, and to those who read this piece, as one who called you fascist in the past and all too often incompetent in recent years.  I speak only for myself in saying that I now apologise for my failure to understand the complexity of what you do.

Like many who came to adulthood in the crazy 1980’s I saw you as simply the pigs or the Boere, agents of a sick regime, the muscle that kept an unworkable and immoral society going well past its sell-by date ( for those who seek precision in these things, this was about 1960, the age of decolonisation). In fairness to those like me, you did not offer us much to our minds – but even after ’94 you did not seem to win friends and influence citizens.

Nor did revelations about some of your post-apartheid commanders – crooks at worst, political appointees at best (and sometimes both) – exactly win our confidence. And then, of course, you were trapped by the zealous language of human rights that seems not to discriminate even between honest citizens and scum.

My views have been challenged by writer-lawyer (and sometime revolutionary) Andrew Brown, who took the daring step to become a police reservist in Cape Town. In his memoir of being a part-time beat cop in Cape Town (Street Blues [Zebra Press, 2008], a book I heartily recommend), I came to see how difficult your job is: how often what you do relies on that elusive creature called instinct – and how much, as a result, those who lack the knack can make terrible mistakes.

Of course, as a default position used all too often, we can blame your excesses and failures on apartheid. After all, most police were simply agents of crowd control and dompas enforcement, with a few creamed off to for ‘national security’ and a handful left to solve more complex crimes. After 1994 you started off at a disadvantage – and though more scientific methods of policing were introduced the new ‘affirmative action’ did not extend to police salaries or attracting skilled professionals to swell your ranks.

Perhaps we got what we deserved – paying you salaries that made teachers and nurses look like executives by comparison, and a pittance compared to what you could earn in politics, even sending some of you overseas. Maybe utopian delusions made us embarrassed to upgrade your policing skills – the rainbow nation does not need policing after all, does it? Unlike Brown, how many of us consider taking responsibility for the gaps in policing and put ourselves forward to help?

So when you blunder around, mess up crime scenes or take bribes we readily condemn you. We sigh, perhaps with more than a little racist condescension (as English-speaking whites did in the past aboutWillie Koekemoer, forgetting that then as now you were probably Willie Zulu), and point the finger – forgetting the three fingers pointing back at us.

Good luck and my prayers, friends, on Police Day.