Content warning: This article discusses police brutality.
We are almost three decades into our democracy that was founded on some of the most progressive human rights in the world. But, here we find ourselves mourning the murder of Collins Khosa. Alongside many others, he was murdered by our police force during the patrols to enforce the COVID-19 lockdown. The brutality and show of merciless force by the police is reminiscent of the darkest days in our nation’s history.
The unrelenting brutality of the police was the face of Apartheid. It was a force at the forefront of denying dignity to groups of people and they took away their humanity. They harassed people who were not carrying passes. They used brutal force to remove people from their homes that were designated as “white areas” and (quite literally) loaded them on a truck back to their designated, overpopulated homelands. They preyed on people who were vulnerable and oppressed, and added brutal beatings and killings to their long list of suffering. The laws of Apartheid were extremely repressive in their own right, but the police force had imprinted a conscious notion of repugnance towards Black people and People of Colour (POC). They treated them as subhuman and regarded full humanity as a white-only quality. The police’s conduct was to inspire terror against those they regarded as inferior.
Then, after Apartheid, we entered our widely celebrated constitutional democracy. The police were “demilitarised” through a superficial renaming and the idea was to make people understand that they are the protectors of the public and not the oppressors any longer. This is hard to imagine when we are literally living in a country where we have soldiers marching the streets, where our movement is restricted, and where we have witnessed the deaths of Black people at the hands of the “protectors of the public”.
Our government continuously incites police to show no mercy to criminals, to use maximum force to get the job done, even before conviction. The line between suspect and convict has become blurred. The right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty does not apply to everyone equally and it very much depends on the colour of your skin. Our Ministers of Police still feel the need to appeal to the most macho and aggressive elements with the police force, encouraging or condoning violence and illegality.
We may be living in a (theoretical) democracy, but it does not feel like anything has changed. Black people and POC are still the collateral damage for lax, violence-driven policing – just like in Apartheid. They are still dying at the hands of the force that they are supposed to be protected by. The lockdown period has shown us this in an extremely uncomfortable close look. How many white people are stopped at roadblocks? How many white people are lying on the ground being frisked by the police, because of their “suspicion” of criminality? The aggressive methods used by the police must be addressed. Their mentality of oppression and enforcing laws must not hinder them to exercise their duties to serve and protect our people with their full humanity.
1994 was a landmark for our country, but it merely marked the abolishment of Apartheid’s racist laws. Its oppressive legacy was left unchecked and with it we gave free rein for an Apartheid-style of policing to imprison our democracy and the freedom of our people.