Sex, drugs and general bloody rudeness - it's all happening in Johannesburg's 2,000 parks. But greenery and peace are plentiful, thanks to the fearless foot-soldiers of City Parks Veroniccah Ngoepe once hunted serial killers for the South African Police Service. Now she polices Joburg's green spaces. She isn't sure which job is tougher.Ngoepe and 19 other rangers patrol more than 2,000 parks around Johannesburg. "There's where we often find people selling nyaope," she says of a spot in Joubert Park, one of the red zones. Lead park ranger Sizwe Mabuza says that until about three years ago, the noxious cocktail of drugs was just a Durban problem. Now it's "out of hand" in Joburg's parks."I'm a father," he says. "If I see someone young using, I ask them: 'Where do you get this?' But nine times out of 10, they're already goofed."Drugs cost City Parks a heap of money. "See this?" says Ngoepe. "There were lights here. These guys steal anything to sell." In the playground, children improvise, making a game of hanging from the chains of swings. The seats are gone.story_article_left1Park rangers are trying to weed out drug kingpins from Joburg's lawns, but admit the problem is bigger than they can handle. "We rely on informers in the parks, but not everyone wants to co-operate," says ranger Robert Tshishonge, also ex-SAPS. His partner there was paralysed in a shooting incident. "It traumatised me." It's why he left to become a park ranger - he says the job is less dangerous. But it's not without risk.Nyaope addicts, more hostile than park potheads, are the ones to watch out for.Park rangers, who aren't allowed to enforce bylaws, only to observe and report back, are unarmed. So how do they protect themselves? "You run."Dagga smokers disperse when they see the rangers - but slowly. Ngoepe points at a worn patch of ground. "See," she says. The scuffing of drug addicts' shoes is "causing soil erosion".As rangers, their mandate is to keep the city green, but they can't do that without head-buttinghuman issues. In Kensington's Bezuidenhout Park, for instance, Zionists arrive in droves for river baptisms."We tell them it's not allowed," says Ngoepe. "Then they ask why. We say it's because we are greening the city." It's an important job, she says. "We do this for future generations."You have to work with people, she says. "We teach them. People don't know what's wrong and right." "Rights," spits another ranger. "That's what they always say. I've got rights. Rights to piss on a tree."full_story_image_hleft1Ranger Archie Sigwavhulimu has worked at City Parks for 34 years. He chain-smokes. "Unless they solve homelessness, how can there be change?"Vagrancy is one of the biggest challenges, and Mabuza says it's increasing alarmingly. "We can't discriminate. People have the right to be in our parks from sunrise to sunset." After the gates close, people scale them. He sighs. "As City Parks, we are chasing our own tail."Joburg's inner-city parks draw people from all over Africa, he says. "They end up in our parks, because they have nowhere else to go."Alen Grobbler, who manages a Hillbrow shelter that gives up to 150 people a hot meal and bed for R8 a night, says space in shelters is an issue driving people to the parks, but it's not the only one. Some park residents are labourers who can't afford a taxi home every day.But for many, this is home. "Welcome to my kingdom," says one man. "This is my kitchen, that's my lounge. Isn't it nice?" He waves his hand over brown grass.story_article_right2Even pigeons, the peasants of feathered society, retreat here, under the spray-painted trees. A few homeless boys play chess on a giant chessboard in the long, dead hours. "I'm missing a rook and a knight," says Brian, a teen with holes in his shoes.Sigwavhulimu can recall these chessboards from 1969. "People would have weddings here. No more."But there is still life here, and not just in the adjacent Johannesburg Art Gallery. A street photographer takes snaps of lovers relaxing on benches that once declared "Whites Only", and a woman beads vuvuzelas to sell. She says it's more peaceful here than in a shelter.But informal trading isn't allowed in our parks (which would put many an ice-cream seller and bootlegging gogo out of business). When asked why vending isn't permitted, one ranger says: "Because it's illegal."Since the park ranger unit launched in 2008, "all our parks are safe", says Ngoepe."I don't feel safe. There are too many hobos," says a mother at the Joubert Park playground. She says she has nowhere else to take her children to play.full_story_image_hleft2Drive from Joubert Park to Joburg's flusher northern suburbs and you step into a bucolic painting of picnickers and blow-dried poodles.One dog-walker bemoans the utter bloody rudeness of speeding cyclists, who say the same about dog-walkers. I can't help but think that selling a screw from one sleek mountain bike could buy Brian a rook for his chessboard."What park etiquette?" says one man. "People shagging in the bushes, smoking dope... Pooh!" Then his Labradoodle does just that."We have dog poo problems," says Matome Baholo, City Parks security head honcho. "The very same people who are educated, who can read our signage, turn a blind eye and refuse to Pick. Up. Their. Dog. Mess." He spears his notebook with a pen. "In South Africa, we've developed a culture of being anti the law."Johannesburg Botanical Gardens curator Sandra Viljoen says she's heard the excuses. "People are abrupt if you address them on issues like leashing their dogs. They feel they own the park."Poop or no poop, Baholo concedes that on the surface, people in posher parks such as Sandton's Innesfree Farm are better behaved than inner-city ones."You find people pretending to read a book, but they're busy taking drugs," he says. "Or a guy parks his BMW and decides to fall in love." With a prostitute."We find a lot of people having sex," says one ranger. "They like it in the park." And evidently in cemeteries too, also City Parks turf. People fornicate among the tombstones.full_story_image_hleft3On weekends and holidays, Zoo Lake draws at least 10,000 people a day. But the people we don't see are those who clean up before we arrive, so we can enjoy our watercress salads without slipping on any condoms.Simangele Hlophe, 31, a litter-picker who lives in Diepkloof, says she can collect up to 30 condoms on a busy day like Easter Sunday. A mask and rubber gloves are standard work wear."We pick up a lot of dirty things," she says. Sanitary pads. Labradoodle land mines. Needles. "Sometimes you feel like vomiting."On weekends, from 6am until the last braai tong leaves, Hlophe and five other litter-pickers - all women - cover the 49ha of the park by foot. "We go everywhere, even the hidden places."But the hardest thing to deal with is the people. "You worry the drunk ones will hit you," says Lillian Stephens, a single mother. Even sober, people litter next to an empty dustbin. "They say, 'I'm creating a job for you.' You get angry, but you have to suck it up and do your job."I ask if she's picked up anything strange. "Yes. Children." They get separated from their parents on family outings. "While I'm picking up litter, I think about how I'm making a healthier environment for the kids who play here," says Stephens, who earns R80 a day.She has one of Joburg's filthiest parks to clean. An eight-tonne truck makes three trips to Zoo Lake to remove all the litter after the bedlam of a Sunday. Twenty-four stinking tonnes.Rose Abdullah, City Parks's maintenance drill sergeant for eight wards in "Region B", which includes Zoo Lake, deploys man and machine to clean 91 parks a month. That's just standard spring cleaning. "We also do blitz raids if areas get excessively dirty," she says.story_article_left3Baholo folds his hands at the Johannesburg City Parks and Zoo offices in Braamfontein. "Look. We are having it tough with our parks." There's a lack of collaboration between city departments. "First, you need police to respond to vagrancy. Then, we need social development to house them..."It's a shaky house of cards. "We can't instruct the JMPD or SAPS to help us. We have to ask. It's my dream to see park rangers converted to peace officers, so they can have powers to enforce bylaws within public open spaces." Add to that dream, horses for the rangers, and dogs to sniff out the nyaope bosses.They'd lead him straight to Pullinger Kop Park. The Hillbrow park makes Joubert Park look like Sunday school. "I'm talking multitudes of young people, taking drugs in front of police."But opiates are only one of Baholo's worries. All day his phone buzzes with complaints. A mugging on Melville Koppies. Someone's taking "a nice bath" in a stream, felling an oak (you'll be walloped with a fine of at least R60,000), or cooking Egyptian geese. "I've heard they don't taste so good." Now and again, he says, someone reports a dead body."It's funny," Mabuza says. There's this mentality in South Africa that a park is a place to get shamelessly sloshed "yet on the street, you'll hide your bottle".Baholo's theory is that it may be precisely our parks' gorgeousness that leads to ugly manners, because people feel they can relax and abandon inhibitions. And sometimes underwear."We're the only city in Africa winning global awards left and right for our parks," he says. We even trump Cape Town. But to maintain that status takes an army.Soweto's Thokoza Park is one that's getting it right, he says. "The community stood up to say we own this park." For those who have moved out of Soweto and return to the park for a family braai, a Sunday tradition, it's not just a patch of green: it's home."We've invested millions into our parks," Baholo says. "If our parks were to be lost we'd lose our identity as the new Joburg."Our parks on weekends are thrumming with stokvel members and lycra-clad joggers and fungus researchers and rowing jocks and pram-pushers and Somali grooms in gold Crimplene. They're where the communal spirit of this jaded city comes alive with initiatives such as the parkrun, a weekly running event that attracts 81,000 people to 11 Joburg parks.Some Jozi dwellers might say their parks are their very own dopamine fix. Sanctuaries in this big slab of concrete."I've been taking my kids to Delta Park since they were born," says one man. Yes it's a pity about those vulgar rubes flouting decorum, he says, but: "To have these spaces in a big city like ours? It's a fucking gift"...