‘We get sucked into everybody’s mess’: Protests and Public Order Policing in South Africa

Abstract

Based on interviews with 43 serving members at four Public Order Police units, this article highlights the perspectives of officers involved in arguably the most contentious and visible aspect of South African policing. As the primary arm of the police responsible for crowd management, Public Order members are at the coalface of a country inundated with protests. Respondents describe an environment in which they are forced to contend with politicians’ negligence and incitement of protest, the vagaries of mediation and the hostility of many protestors, all while they often share the frustrations of the crowds they are required to manage. Examining these representations provides critical insight into how these police, who are a central component of the civil strife afflicting South Africa, interpret the challenges of the job. Public Order Police are an integral element in protests but not just as the strong arm of the state suppressing dissent. Rather, they fulfil multiple functions in an intricate protest landscape over which they exercise limited control.

Keywords:

• police
• protests
• violence
• South Africa

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant no. 435-2017-0913). I am grateful to the SAPS members who took the time to share their experiences and perceptions. Thanks also to the editors and anonymous reviewers at the Journal of Southern African Studies.

Notes

1 See for example A. Altbeker, The Dirty Work of Democracy: A Year on the Street with the SAPS (Cape Town and Johannesburg, Jonathan Ball, 2005); A. Faull, Police Work and Identity: A South African Ethnography (New York, Routledge, 2018); J. Hornberger, Policing and Human Rights: The Meaning of Violence and Justice in the Everyday Policing of Johannesburg (Oxford, Routledge, 2011); J. Steinberg, Thin Blue: The Unwritten Rules of Policing South Africa (Johannesburg, Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2008).

2 M. Marks, Transforming the Robocops: Changing Police in South Africa (Pietermaritzburg, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005). Marks’s fieldwork was completed before the surge in protests that began in 2004–05. A more recent contribution is H. Brooks, ‘Democracy and its Discontents: Protest from a Police Perspective’, South African Crime Quarterly, 67 (2019).

3 Open-ended interviews focusing on the POP work environment, challenges faced by members and the ways in which POP has evolved were conducted at units in Cape Town (National Reserve Unit and Provincial Unit) in July 2019 – 17 interviews; Johannesburg (Unit 2) in November 2022 – 14 interviews; and Durban (National Reserve Unit) in February 2023 – 12 interviews. Ranks are withheld to protect respondents’ identities.

4 This is a substantial literature. Prominent contributions include: P. Alexander, ‘Rebellion of the Poor: South Africa’s Service Delivery Protests – A Preliminary Analysis’, Review of African Political Economy, 37, 123 (2010) pp. 25–40; K. von Holdt, M. Langa, S. Molapo, N. Mogapi, K. Ngubeni, J. Dlamini and A. Kirsten, ‘The Smoke that Calls: Insurgent Citizenship, Collective Violence and the Struggle for a Place in the New South Africa: Eight Case Studies of Community Protests and Xenophobic Violence’, Research Report (Johannesburg, Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation and Society, Work and Development Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, 2011); J. Duncan, Protest Nation: The Right to Protest in South Africa (Pietermaritzburg, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2016).

5 Duncan, Protest Nation, p. 1.

6 Different definitions and databases are employed by media, non-governmental organisations and the police to record ‘protests’ or ‘gatherings’, and there is no consensus on the year-on-year incidence of such events. However, there is general agreement that protests continue to increase. The most used metric is the South African Police Service’s Incident Registration Information System (IRIS), which is compiled by POP units. Each time POP members are deployed to a scene the commander is required to record basic data which are then used to construct a national account of the frequency and nature of such events, including the prevalence of ‘unrest’ that involves forceful intervention by police. IRIS is not without detractors, but it remains the most cited source for tracking numbers and types of crowd events that require a police presence. For assessments of IRIS reliability, see: P. Alexander, C. Runciman and B. Maruping, ‘The Use and Abuse of Police Data in Protest Analysis: South Africa’s Incident Registration Information System’, South African Crime Quarterly, 58 (2016), Duncan, Protest Nation, pp. 56–9.

7 M. Bekker, ‘Language of the Unheard: Police-Recorded Protests in South Africa, 1997–2013’, Review of African Political Economy, 49,172 (2022), p. 240.

8 D. Bruce, ‘Public Order Transparency: Using Freedom of Information Laws to Analyse the Policing of Protest’, South Africa Crime Quarterly, 58 (2016), p. 25.

9 IRIS numbers for the last four available years: April 2018–March 2019, 11,431 ‘crowd peaceful incidents policed’, 4,526 ‘crowd unrest incidents stabilised’; April 2019–March 2020, 8,608 and 3,636; April 2020–March 2021, 5,286 and 2,764; April 2021–March 2022, 6,149 and 2,604: SAPS Research Division, Operational Response Service.

10 E. Stolz, ‘Protests Set to Increase This Year’, Mail & Guardian, Johannesburg (3 February 2023), available at https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/mail-guardian/20230203/28158665474448., retrieved 26 February 2024.

11 J. Rauch and D. Storey, The Policing of Public Gatherings and Demonstrations in South Africa, 1960-1994 (Johannesburg, Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, 1998).

12 G. Kynoch, Township Violence and the End of Apartheid: War on the Reef (Woodbridge and Johannesburg, James Currey and Wits University Press, 2018).

13 B. Omar, ‘Crowd Control: Can Our Public Order Police Still Deliver?’, South Africa Crime Quarterly, 15 (2006), pp. 8–9.

14 The following brief account of public order policing in post-apartheid South Africa is drawn from M. Marks’s and D. Bruce’s essay, ‘Groundhog Day? Public Order Policing Twenty Years into Democracy’, South African Journal of Criminal Justice, 346 (2014), pp. 346–76.

15 M. Marks and D. Bruce, ‘Marikana and the Politics of Public Order Policing’, in G.M. Khadiagala, P. Naidoo, D. Pillay and R. Southall (eds), New South African Review 5: Beyond Marikana (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2016), p. 217.

16 Marks and Bruce, ‘Groundhog Day?’, p. 367.

17 SAPS, ‘National Instruction 4 of 2014 Public Order Police: Crowd Management during Public Gatherings and Demonstration’, available at https://protestguide.org.za/national-instruction.pd., retrieved 9 July 2023.

18 Marks, Transforming the Robocops, p. 5.

19 Von Holdt et al., ‘The Smoke that Calls’, pp. 30, 69.

20 D. Bruce, ‘The Use of Less-Lethal Weapons in South African Prisons and Crowd Management’, Institute for Security Studies Monograph no. 201 (November 2019), p. 32.

21 D. Bruce, L. Lancaster and G. Newham, ‘Crime and Punishment: Crime and Policing-Related Protest in South Africa’, in H. Brooks, R. Chikane and S. Mottiar (eds), Protest in South Africa: Rejection, Reassertion, Reclamation (Johannesburg, Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection, 2023), p. 345.

22 S. Smillie, ‘Trigger-Happy Use of Rubber Bullets by Police Results in Death and Lifelong Injury in South Africa’, Daily Maverick, Johannesburg (12 August 2021), available at https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-08-12-trigger-happy-use-of-rubber-bullets-by-police-results-in-death-and-lifelong-injury-in-south-africa., retrieved 25 February 2024; D. Knoetze, ‘Ten Years after Andries Tatane was Killed, the Police’s Misuse of Rubber Bullets is Still Unchecked’, News24, 13 April 2021, available at https://www.news24.com/news24/southafrica/news/ten-years-after-andries-tatane-was-killed-the-polices-misuse-of-rubber-bullets-is-still-unchecked-2021041., retrieved 3 March 2022.

23 Durban, interview no. 5.

24 B. Jauregui, Provisional Authority: Police, Order, and Security in India (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 156. For a discussion of similar vulnerabilities encountered by Pakistani police, see Z. Waseem, Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2022).

25 Marks, Transforming the Robocops, pp. 66–7.

26 Faull, Police Work, pp. 101, 125.

27 Faull, Ibid., p. 154.

28 N. Howarth, War in Peace: The Truth about the South African Police’s East Rand Riot Unit, 1986-1994 (Johannesburg, Galago Books, 2012), p. 181.

29 Durban, interview no. 5.

30 Durban, interview no. 2.

31 Cape Town, interview no. 15.

32 Johannesburg, interview no. 3.

33 Heidi Brooks recorded similar sentiments in her interviews with Public Order members: ‘[i]t was clear that their disagreement was not with the reasons for protest, but the methods employed by protestors, which often involved damaging or burning property’; Brooks, ‘Democracy’, p. 23.

34 Durban, interview no. 8.

35 Only SAPS members who provide administrative support, and thus are not deemed essential workers, have the right to strike.

36 Durban, interview no. 9.

37 Johannesburg, interview no. 6.

38 Cape Town, interview no. 1.

39 Johannesburg, interview no. 9.

40 Cape Town, interview no. 10.

41 Cape Town, interview no. 10.

42 Durban, interview no. 8.

43 Durban, interview no. 3.

44 J. Steinberg, ‘Policing During and After Apartheid: A New Perspective on Continuity and Change’, in J. Beek, M. Göpfert, O. Owen and J. Steinberg (eds), Police in Africa: The Street-Level View (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 76. See also S. Booysen, ‘The Nexus of Citizen, Party and State in Accumulating Protest Repertoires in South Africa’, in Brooks, Chikane and Mottiar, Protest in South Africa, pp. 54–81.

45 Durban, interview no. 6.

46 Cape Town, interview no. 8.

47 Cape Town, interview no. 10.

48 Johannesburg, interview no. 9.

49 Johannesburg, interview no. 4.

50 Johannesburg, interview no. 12.

51 Z. Stuurman, Can We Be Safe? The Future of Policing in South Africa (Cape Town, Tafelberg, 2021), p. 148.

52 Durban, interview no. 8.

53 Steinberg, Thin Blue, p. 22.

54 Durban, interview no. 13.

55 Interview, Axolile Notywala, Khayelitsha, 5 July 2019.

56 Johannesburg, interview no. 5.

57 Durban, interview no. 3.

58 Johannesburg, interview no. 9.

59 Cape Town, interview no. 3.

60 Cape Town, interview no. 4.

61 Durban, interview no. 6.

62 Durban, interview no. 1.

63 Johannesburg, interview no. 2.

64 Durban, interview no. 6.

65 Cape Town, interview no. 1.

66 Cape Town, interview no. 3.

67 Durban, interview no. 4.

68 Durban, interview no. 3.

69 D. Bruce, ‘Ntumba Verdict Continues South Africa’s Police Impunity Trend’, Institute for Security Studies, ISS Today, 7 July 2022, available at https://issafrica.org/iss-today/ntumba-verdict-continues-south-africas-police-impunity-tren., retrieved 18 September 2023. See also Duncan, Protest Nation, p. 140. As Bruce points out, it is very difficult for investigators to identify the responsible party when rubber bullets are misused: ‘[t]his is because of the police culture of silence, the difficulty of identifying police wearing protective equipment, and the chaotic nature of many public order situations. Also, ballistics cannot link rubber bullets to the shotgun used to discharge them’.

70 Johannesburg, interview no. 11.

71 Johannesburg, interview no. 2.

72 Johannesburg, interview no. 7.

73 H. Sullivan, ‘Sticks, Stones, and Broken Bones: Protest Violence and the State’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 63, 3 (2019), p. 706.

74 J. Hornberger, ‘We Need a Complicit Police! Political Policing Then and Now’, South African Crime Quarterly, 48 (2014), p. 21.

75 Jauregui, Provisional Authority, p. 10.

76 Durban, interview no. 1.