Criminal rights versus police and community rights

An interesting debate is taking place in South Africa right now.

Yesterday, April 9th, the Deputy Minister of Safety and Security, Ms. Susan Shabangu, attended an imbizo (a traditional community gathering) in Danville near Pretoria. During the meeting she astonished the news media (and received a standing ovation from residents) when she said that residents and police should kill criminals, particularly those who put lives in danger.

“You must kill the bastards if they threaten you or the community. You must not worry about the regulations. That is my responsibility. Your responsibility is to serve and protect . . . I want to assure the police station commissioners and policemen and women from these areas that they have permission to kill these criminals. I won’t tolerate any pathetic excuses for you not being able to deal with crime. You have been given guns, now use them.

“I want no warning shots. You have one shot and it must be a kill shot. If you miss, the criminals will go for the kill. They don’t miss. We can’t take this chance.”

“Criminals are hell-bent on undermining the law and they must now be dealt with. If criminals dare to threaten the police or the livelihood or lives of innocent men, women and children, they must be killed. End of story. There are to be no negotiations with criminals.”

“The constitution says criminals must be kept safe, but I say No!”

Her remarks appear to contravene Section 49 of the Criminal Procedures Act, which states that police may only kill a criminal if a life is in danger. They’ve drawn a firestorm of criticism from opposition politicians, who’ve called for her dismissal. The police oversight body, the Independent Complaints Directorate, has warned that all police would be held accountable for their actions. The SA Human Rights Commission has also weighed in on the matter.

However, her remarks have met with enormous approval from the South African public, and also from many policemen in the ranks. South Africa is now one of the most crime-ridden countries in the world, with over 22,000 murders annually. The USA, with well over six times South Africa’s population, had just over 17,000 in 2006 (the latest year for which statistics are available): so on a per-capita basis South Africa’s murder rate is more than eight times greater than the USA’s. The rates of commission of other crimes display an equal or greater disparity. Some of them, such as rape and child sexual abuse, have been described as “endemic” in South Africa.

The great difficulty here is that the South African government is trying to impose a set of civilized standards on a population that is, in a great many ways, still very far from civilized. Old tribal customs and superstitions still predominate in a very large proportion of South Africa’s people. To give just a few out of many possible examples:

• Women were, in tribal tradition, the possessions of their fathers and then of their husbands (who “bought” them from their fathers by paying lobola, a “bride price”, traditionally in cattle but nowadays in furniture, appliances or even a car). That attitude towards women – that they’re possessions of men rather than full human beings in their own right – is still not uncommon in South Africa (and, indeed, in Africa as a whole).
• Tribal rivalries still lead to assaults and murders on both an individual and a community basis – indeed, inter-tribal and inter-clan warfare still flourishes in parts of the country.
• Belief in the power of witch-doctors still leads to the murder of innocents, particularly children, to obtain their body parts for use in muti or traditional “medicine”. If you go to the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (the largest and most traded in Africa) you’ll find traders with multiple University degrees . . . who still stop at muti shops outside the Exchange every morning to buy “medicine” to guarantee them a good day’s trading, or produce bad trades for their opponents on the floor.

Over and above these factors, poverty, lack of education and the inability to find work (it’s estimated that over a third of South Africa’s population are both unemployed – at least in the formal sector – and unemployable) and the lack of any social “safety net” such as large-scale welfare and support systems means that many turn to crime in sheer desperation.

There has always been a tradition in some South African communities that they take care of their own problems. I’ve seen this in action twice. The first was when a young girl came home in tears from her school in Soweto outside Johannesburg in the 1980’s. A “flasher” had exposed himself to her and her friends as they walked home. Her grandfather, a Zulu and a senior shift worker at a nearby mine, happened to be at home and heard her story. Furious, he assigned a couple of workers from his shift to escort her to and from school for the next few days. (Their salaries were made up by their comrades at the mine, who quite understood what was going on.)

Over the next few days the two men escorted her to and fro, constantly looking for the flasher. It didn’t take long for her to spot him and point him out, confirmed by her friends who’d been with her that day. The flasher took off running, but it didn’t do him any good and he was caught within a few blocks. The entire neighborhood poured out of their homes to watch what happened.

The miners didn’t bother to call the police. They simply dragged the flasher to the nearest waist-height stone wall, dropped his trousers, laid his penis and testicles over the top of the wall and hit them once, with an overhead swing at full strength, using a twenty-pound mining sledgehammer. The resulting mincemeat couldn’t be saved and had to be amputated at the local hospital.

The police came around making inquiries, of course, but they knew perfectly well what had happened and didn’t try too hard to find the “culprits” (and, needless to say, none of the many hundreds of people who had witnessed the incident could remember a thing about it). The upshot was that incidents of sexual assault in that neighborhood dropped to almost zero for several years afterwards. The word had gone forth – “here, we look after our own”.

The second incident happened several years later in a township where I was serving as a pastor. A young girl was walking home after school when a rapist dragged her into some bushes and sexually assaulted her. Her screams were heard, and the locals ran over to the bushes to catch the rapist in flagrante delicto. Again, they didn’t bother to call the police. One of them looked around and found a bottle lying in the grass. They broke the bottle against a rock and used the jagged shards of glass to castrate the rapist on the spot. His penis and testicles were then nailed to a nearby telephone pole as a warning to others who might have similar inclinations. He almost bled to death before police found him and took him to hospital.

Once again, the police investigated, and once again none of the dozens of people involved (or their neighbors) could remember a thing. I remonstrated with members of my congregation because I knew that some of them had been involved in this incident. I pointed out that if they got the wrong man there was no way to reverse such an action, and tried to make the case that it was better to let the police and the courts sort it out.

Their reaction was one of puzzled indignation. Why could their rather naive white umfundisi (priest) not understand that in the first place, they hadn’t got the wrong man – they’d caught him in the act, after all – and in the second place, why waste their tax money on police and a trial? He wouldn’t be raping anyone else ever again!

I had to admit that they had a point . . . and from that perspective, one can understand Ms. Shabangu’s remarks (and their very enthusiastic public reception) in a whole new light.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out over time.

Peter