Violent: Official figures indicated that the South African police kill more than twice the number of people per capita than the police in the United States. (Photo by Darren Stewart/Gallo Images via Getty Images)
KwaZulu-Natal is, consistently, the worst province for police killings as well as political assassinations. The police admit to having killed 142 people in the province last year, just over 30% of the national total of 448 people. The real figures must be higher.
Official figures indicated that the South African police kill more than twice the number of people per capita than the police in the United States, according to research in 2021 by Paul T Clarke, a doctoral student at Harvard.
On 19 July the KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner, Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, told the media that at least 31 people had been killed in shootouts with the police since April. On 30 July he said that nine more people had been killed in four separate incidents on four days.
Police violence is part of a wider system of violence by people legally authorised to enact certain forms of violence and often allowed to enact unlawful forms of violence. That system includes the army, prison warders, municipal anti-land invasion units and private security companies.
Panyaza Lesufi, Gauteng’s buffoonish premier, recently added poorly trained “crime wardens” known as amaPanyaza to the mix. They swiftly became notorious for harassing migrants and have joined the police and private security in unlawful “raids” on shack settlements in which people’s homes have been dismantled and property destroyed and stolen.
Lesufi now wants to join Durban and Cape Town and have his own inhouse anti-land invasion unit too, a move that inevitably means the state will respond to impoverishment with violence rather than support.
He also wants 3 000 military veterans to be “unleashed” to “reclaim” downtown Johannesburg from “criminals”. More killings and the further escalation of the ongoing abuse of migrants and impoverished people seems inevitable. We all remember what happened when the army was deployed to the streets during the Covid lockdowns.
A central reason both the routinely unlawful and sometimes fatal exercise of state violence and the drive to expand the state’s capacity for violence are widely seen as legitimate is that there is so much interpersonal violence in society.
Our homicide rate is six times the global average. One study places us as the country with the 11th highest rate of murder in the world. Aside from Ecuador, Belize and Lesotho the other countries in the top 10 are all in the Caribbean. Rates of rape and violence against women are also extremely high.
We are also a country in which it is common for people to see violence as a legitimate and, at times, necessary way to resolve certain kinds of problems, and for men to see their capacity for violence as an important part of their personal identity and social standing.
People said to be criminals, migrants, impoverished people and people struggling with addiction, among others, are regularly dehumanised by elite actors as well as ordinary people.
Much of our media and many of our politicians routinely speak about migrants in ways that would be seen as a crude expression of the toxicity of the far right in many other countries. Gayton McKenzie, a grotesque figure, recently lent his weight as a cabinet minister to the sadism driving the online mobbing of a young woman for having a Nigerian surname.
The dehumanisation of people struggling with addiction is pervasive. In many parts of the world people dull their despair with opiates, whether bought on the streets or accessed through medical prescriptions. Enlightened opinion understands this as a medical crisis requiring interventions grounded in compassion. Here we often dismiss people with addiction issues as criminals and refer to them as amapara, a term of uncertain origin but sometimes thought to come from the word “parasite”.
Moreover, journalists and academics regularly write that people using cheap heroin, often referred to as whoonga or nyaope, are consuming a uniquely lurid concoction of antiretroviral drugs, rat poison and materials gleaned from flat screen televisions. These fantastical accounts often make no mention of the fact that the sole or chief ingredient of samples of these drugs tested in laboratories is heroin. Instead of understanding that we are dealing with our own experience of a global crisis of opioid addiction we casually misrepresent some of our most vulnerable people as living in a uniquely perverse realm beyond ordinary human experience.
The scapegoating and dehumanisation of vulnerable people is an ordinary part of life in South Africa and high levels of violence leave people exhausted, frightened and angry. It is unsurprising that many people see more violence as the solution to some of our problems and that many have welcomed the escalation of police killings.
But we don’t live in the sort of film in which a heroic police officer goes rogue and breaks the law to take on evil in the interests of the greater good. As Pierre de Vos noted in a recent article, police paid out more than R2.2 billion as compensation for wrongful arrests in the past five years and are facing claims of more than R108 billion for various kinds of misconduct.
Given how few of the people who are victims of abuse at the hands of the police can take the police to court, these numbers, as vast as they are, can only be an indication of a much wider problem.
Despite all this it remains common for the media to produce reports on police killings that are solely based on police reports and assume the veracity of statements made by the police. This is inevitably mediated by race and class. The media would not report in this way if the police had killed a well-off white person in a gated community.
A report in News24 in 2021 on the police killing of Abahlali baseMjondolo activist Zamekile Shangase in Lamontville, Durban, falsely stated that she had been killed in crossfire after the police returned fire at dangerous criminals. It gave no sources for the claim but it seems safe to assume that the false claim was based on information received from the police.
A later report produced by a respected journalist, who spent time on the scene and spoke to many witnesses, confirmed nobody had fired on the police. The News24 report did not even bother to name Shangase, who was killed by the police during a raid in which they demanded that residents show purchase receipts for items in their possession.
A 2013 report in this newspaper on the police killing of Nqobile Nzuza, a teenage Abahlali baseMjondolo member, in Cato Crest, Durban, only quoted a police spokesperson on the details of the killing. The spokesperson’s claim that the police had to fire on a mob to prevent the imminent murder of police officers was shown to be wholly untrue when the matter went to court, and a police officer was sentenced for murder.
There are, of course, police officers who conduct themselves with integrity and courage under very difficult circumstances, including the courage to oppose the corruption and political capture of significant chunks of the police force. Each action of the police, and the conduct of each officer and unit must be assessed on evidence rather than assumption.
If the media are to avoid functioning to legitimate state violence, including lethal violence, against, in the main, impoverished black people, it needs to ensure that statements by the police regarding police killings must be taken as claims rather than facts. This principle must hold with all police killings, something that requires the media to accord the same weight to every life.
There is some good research in South Africa and elsewhere on the causes of violence in society. We know that here murder is strongly correlated with binge drinking on weekends and holidays and that, globally, it is linked to high levels of incarceration, the easy availability of guns, sanction for parents to beat children, trauma, high rates of inequality, conceptions of masculinity in which the capacity for violence elevates status and prevents humiliation and the normalisation of violent rhetoric in political discourse.
If we wish to build a more peaceful society we need to deal with the causes of violence rather than encouraging more violence by giving the police further sanction to kill.
David Bruce generously shared some of the statistical information used in this article.
Richard Pithouse is a distinguished research fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies in Dublin and New York, an international research scholar in the Philosophy Department at the University of Connecticut and a research associate in the Philosophy Department at the University of Johannesburg.