My police - your police

The informal privatisation of the police in the inner city of Johannesburg1

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2137516
AutoresJulia Hornberger (0000-0003-4396-8516, Institute for Social and Economic Research, autor de correspondencia)
Año2004
Volumen63
Número2
Páginas213-230
Fecha de publicación2004-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAfrican Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0002-0184 • E-ISSN: 1469-2872
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00020180412331318760
OpenAlexW2031605142
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas30
Referencias citadas7

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I would like to thank the Institute for Criminal Justice and Human Rights (ICJHR) of the Technikon SA for their support of a broader research project on human rights and policing of which this article is a product. All names are fictitious. Since Sergeant Kloppers had just moved from the Serious Crime Unit to the General Investigation Unit she had not yet been allocated a car. The arrangement with her ex‐colleague provided her with transport for at least the period of his holiday. A "pointing out note" is an authorisation paper that the complainant can receive from an investigating officer. In principal, this pointing out note can be shown to any police officer and should prompt and authorise him or her to go and arrest the suspect pointed out by the complainant. The idea is that, in a case where the complainant knows or can at least recognise the suspect but the suspect could not be found at an earlier stage, the complainant, can immediately call any police officer for assistance when he/ she gets to know about the whereabouts of the suspect, and thus secure the arrest of the suspect. However, in practice the "pointing out note" is a welcome excuse for some officers who feel they are under time and work pressure in the face of piles of dockets to send off the complainant with the illusion that he or she has been helped. In fact, it is not easy for the complainant to motivate any police officer to assist. Handing out pointing out notes by the detective without some sort of further effort in terms of investigation is more a trick of the trade to manage the workload than it is an effective tool of policing. Imaginaries also reflect wider historical processes but only as far as and in the form that it is relevant for the imagining actors in the experience of everyday life. My understanding of the concept of imaginaries has been inspired by Gaonkar's "Towards new Imaginaries: An Introduction" (2002 Gaonkar, DP. 2002. "Towards New Imaginaries: An Introduction". Public Culture, 14(1): 1–19. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). However, the concern in that article is with social imaginaries, which are more encompassing, shared by large group of people or whole societies. In contrast, my interest lies rather with a local imaginary that is specific to the interaction with the particular institution of the police in a specific place and with people who live under specific conditions. It will become clear that the concurrence of interests in a certain practice — not so much in terms of the why or the motivation for the practice, but in terms of the practice itself — is what makes it possible for the relationship between Peggy and Sergeant Kloppers to appear as one of "my police". This imaginary may not only develop in the Inner City, but its conditions are conducive to the imaginary. In addition, this imaginary is not particular to the post apartheid era, but it is the juxtaposition of a) the post apartheid government's attempt to gain legitimacy for itself through the transformation of its police into a democratic police, with b) the imaginary of the state police as private police, that gives special meaning to it from the perspective of understanding and addressing post apartheid developments. Before the collapse of Grand Apartheid, the inner city was demarcated as a "whites only" area under the Group Areas Act. However, under certain conditions, for example, if a white person signed the lease contract for a black person, landlords were more than willing to let black people rent their properties. These informal arrangements suited the landlords' desire for short‐term profit. The amount of money owed to the city council for water and electricity soon exceeded the income that could be extracted from rent and, in the face of such accumulating debts, to abandon a flat was often seen as the only viable option for property owners. Sam and Peggy both agreed on the sequence of events except, of course, for the details of the alleged intimidation and the validity of the each other's claim to the housing space. A case is normally opened at the charge office. From there, it is passed over to the head of a detective unit, who distributes cases to the various detectives of his unit. Normally, there is a 24‐hour inspection, which means that the docket of the case is handed back after one day to the head of the unit who looks at what kind of investigative steps the detective has undertaken (which he or she has noted down in the docket diary, a section of the docket itself). If the unit head is not satisfied, he or she adds instructions as to how the detective should proceed. At later stages, the unit head inspects the docket again, notes his or her instructions and checks if the earlier instructions have been carried out. Captain Ndlovu had originally served in the uniformed branch but, as a result of affirmative action policy and a great shortage of black senior officers in the detective branch, had been selected to take over one of the detective units. In accordance with the policy, he was to be fast‐tracked: given an intensive introduction to the work of the detectives to streamline him for his new position. In practice, this meant that he was to go from unit to unit within a period of months to assist and get an insight into the tasks and routines of each of the detective units. At the time of this arrest, he was still assisting the captain of the General Investigation Unit. In a cynical comment about affirmative action, Adriaan is suggesting that it was easy for Sergeant Marais to make the captain sign the docket as closed since the captain did not yet know what further steps should be taken. A sense of cohesion unites certain groups of white detectives, cutting across units of the station as well as across stations and special units. I have elaborated on the idea of docket culture in earlier work about the police (Hornberger 2003 Hornberger J 2003 " 'Mama Bat Papa': La Loi sur la Violence Domestique à Sophiatown, Johannesburg.' " Politique Africain. 'Violences Ordinaires' 91 (October) 83 99 [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). The idea is that the workload of the police is so high and that management puts so much pressure on police officers to close dockets, that closing dockets becomes a rationale of its own. As such, it is estranged from the idea of arresting suspects or securing convictions. In this context, I elaborated on various techniques to reduce the pile of dockets, which often entail avoiding further investigation

Criminology · Economic growth · Economics · Informal sector · Political science · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Legal Issues in South Africa · South African History and Culture