Police wars and state repression in South Africa

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of police violence in contemporary South Africa and it is argued that this violence is aimed at upholding an unequal social order. Recent years have seen an alarming rise in the number of deaths and assaults at the hands of the police. Much academic, media and civil society commentary has blamed this on an apparent program of police ‘remilitarization’. Despite its critical tone much of this commentary upholds that the police should be an apolitical force of good in society, but has been led astray by bad policy. In contrast, more radical voices have suggested that the police are a brutal mechanism of state violence, targeted primarily against the black poor. This article will build on this growing critique by discussing recent theory on the links between police institutions, war and capitalist society. It will be argued that state violence and control, of which police brutality is a key force, are not aberrations but in fact are central to the upholding of the post-apartheid liberal order.

Dis-locating public space: Occupy Rondebosch Common, Cape Town

“…In line with contemporary local state practices (McMichael, 2016;Pithouse, 2008), the municipality declared the event illegal. The authorities and apartheid-era armored vehicles stopped different marches, which were planned to converge on the Common on their way, while Casspirs met the remaining protesters on the site (Figure 1).…”

“…In turn, these have been met with increasing state, and in particular, police violence, ''against dissent and the poor'' (McMichael, 2013). As McMichael's work demonstrates, while police violence revives fractures from ''the colonial and apartheid past,'' the South African Police Service has used global megaevents, such as the 2010 soccer World Cup, to fully develop its securitization program and today ''defends newer political and business interests established since 1994'' (McMichael, 2016). This violence is accompanied by the construction of a discourse criminalizing the poor regarding their ''protests (.…”

“….) for basic rights as the delinquency of a lazy and dangerous underclass'' (McMichael, 2016; see also Barchiesi, 2011).…”

“…A Cape Times op-ed justified the heavy-handed repression that the mayor ordered with the well-rehearsed, following arguments (McMichael, 2016;Oldfield and Stokke, 2006;Selmeczi, 2012) 12 : Patricia de Lille herself started by de-legitimizing the claims of the Occupy people, asking ''where is their common sense?'' She accused the (multiracial) protesters of using the race card and belittling municipal efforts to build an inclusive city.…”

A multimodal reading of public protests

“…The resisting choreography in its multiple manifestations may thus render protesters vulnerable to coercive and militarised police responses. Although by no means unique to South Africa, the South African Police Service is reported to show signs of increasing militarisation (McMichael, 2014). In the case of the SAMWU protest march, for the most part the police did not seem to appraise the incursion of territorial boundaries in itself as warranting a coercive or militarised response.…”