EXTRACT | ‘Shoot to Kill’ by Christopher McMichael
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ABOUT THE BOOK
Shoot to Kill: Police and Power in South Africa is a vivid and ambitious survey of the complex politics of security, crime and social control. Nearly three decades after the formal end of apartheid, policing continues to be defined by brutality, incompetence and corruption.
Rather than protecting communities and ensuring justice for victims, the state and private security often enforce cruel wealth, racial and gender inequities. As our society becomes less safe and more divided, Shoot to Kill asks how the police service became this way and is it our best chance for safety?
From the slave driver’s whip in the 18th-century Cape Colony to the dystopian armoured vehicles of our present, this book traces the secret history of the police through colonial wars, apartheid atrocities and hyper-capitalist state capture. Featuring unapologetic critiques of elite power and the stifling politics of fear, while informed by global discussions on police abolition, Shoot to Kill calls for a society based on democracy and justice.
Author Christopher McMichael speaks to the realities of our world, increasingly defined by militarised injustice, and outlines ways we can escape this rusty cage.
Extract: Abolitionist futures
Abolition includes a negative critique which focuses on the flaws and harms of present-day policing. But even more importantly, it includes a positive vision of democratic public safety. Abolition holds that violence and corruption in policing are not just errors that can be fixed with reform, but accurately reflect the class, gender and racial bias implicit in the institution. The system is not broken but is working exactly as it was designed. Abolitionists argue that rather than being synonymous with crime control and safety, the police’s main focus is on upholding state power and the interests of large property owners. Criminal justice systems, as they currently exist, focus on upholding authority rather than the needs and dignity of victims of crime.
For example, if perpetrators are detained or convicted for physical or sexual assault, the police focus on punishing that individual for breaking the country’s laws, rather than on the violation of another person’s bodily autonomy and human dignity. There is no focus on the kind of punishment or restitution the victim may want.
Police are often called to act in situations that are rooted in social problems like poverty and homelessness. They potentially escalate these into violent situations when things could have been resolved more peacefully if there were different interventions from other social actors. Rather than withdrawing police funding as part of a performative, All Cops Are Bastards (ACAB) gesture, abolitionists argue that money currently spent on an ineffective system of weapons and jails is better directed into government initiatives which seriously address the root causes of crime.
Instead of extractive states which use police to keep their citizens in line, abolitionists imagine a reconfiguration of governmental power. They seek to build alternative forms of citizen counter-power that provide social support for people who have been traumatised by violence and harm, and give them a sense of personal autonomy. Take, for instance, the key issues of rape and abuse, and how abolitionists would propose to both protect and bring about justice for survivors. For one, they would point out that the current system of policing is reactive, in that it only intervenes after harms have been committed. In the case of fatal violence, it is too late.
Next, they might describe the ways the police and judicial systems fail survivors of sexual assault. Investigations by the police and the legal process undertaken by the courts often further retraumatises victims. According to the organisation Rape Crisis, the bulk of sexual assault charges are ‘filtered’ out of the legal system, by police and prosecutors deciding not to pursue cases. In a survey of almost 4,000 cases, only 340 ultimately resulted in trials with guilty convictions. With such a low attrition rate, survivors of abuse are often forced to interact with their attackers and are denied both safety and support to process extreme trauma. Instead of addressing sexual assault as a problem affecting people of all classes and backgrounds, it is treated inconsistently. Many privileged perpetrators can use the legal system to avoid censure, while poor abusers are sent to prisons which themselves have high rates of sexual violence.
An abolitionist response would begin with actively working to prevent sexual assault in the first place. This includes educating children about informed consent and reporting abuse, and particularly raising boys using models of positive masculinity, based on respect and care for others instead of violence and sexual conquest. Going further, this also means improving housing and social support, and addressing women’s marginalisation in the economy, so that women and children can escape abusive situations and cope financially. Rather than suddenly making the police disappear, this approach is based on active, material support for vulnerable people, and for the survivors of trauma who have directly experienced the inadequacies of the legal system.
Along with greater efforts at prevention, survivors can be supported through expanding mental health and trauma counselling services, as well as legal aid for victims pursuing cases against perpetrators. At the same time, there are also alternative models of restorative justice, which force perpetrators to acknowledge their crimes and to make restitution to their victims. In New Zealand, the organisation Project Restore offers therapists and counsellors to guide victims through the process. Trained specialists help survivors express their pain, anger, and demands for repair. As part of the project, victims can attend a mediation session with their abuser. For some survivors this may be helpful. For example, they may want to speak to their abuser and know why the abuser committed violence against them. This mediation is not about forcing survivors to meet and forgive their abusers, but allowing them to demand accountability personally.
In the territories controlled by the Zapatistas in Mexico, indigenous customs of arbitration are used for redress. Serious cases like rape and assault are punished with a limited period of incarceration in a locked room, followed by an extended period of punishment where they are made to perform services for the community. Unrepentant criminals, however, are completely ostracised. The point of this model is to go beyond just punishing abuse; it aims to change behaviour by publicly forcing abusers to face consequences for their actions.
Abolition also means empowering communities to defend themselves by the means and methods which work for them. This could include night patrols and training people in self-defence tactics to temporarily neutralise an attacker so they can escape and seek help. Remorseless abusers can be publicly exposed and shamed, and social pressure used to banish them from communities where they have committed harms. In India, high rates of violence against women and an unsympathetic police force has led women to form organisations like the Pink Sari, or Gulabi Gang, who arm themselves with traditional fighting sticks. They have used these to thrash domestic abusers, while also occupying the buildings of corrupt officials, preventing arranged child marriages and supporting striking farmers.
Such vigilantism can run the risk of creating a popular climate of violence, in which some people may be wrongly accused. But unlike groups which endorse a conservative, vengeful model of social order (such as anti-migrant vigilante organisations in South Africa), Pink Sari use a limited, targeted form of coercion in a situation where women and girls are exposed to gang rapes, abductions and other horrific abuse. Beating rapists with sticks may not be a long-term solution to the problems of patriarchal violence, but it is arguably more humane and effective than armed police and prisons.
One criticism of abolition is that it is unrealistic and beholden to a fantastical belief that immediately ending policing will result in social peace and a human fraternity that has never existed. This is misrepresentative. Abolitionists accept the reality that no current government is going to voluntarily dissolve its own police. After all, they are the final line of defence between the rulers and the ruled. Although, it should be noted that Costa Rica abolished its army in 1948 and has now been officially demilitarised for over 70 years. The Costa Rica scenario calls into question, at the very least, how much of the war machine countries need to invest in, in order to feel safe.
Instead of a moralistic injunction that the police be dissolved tomorrow, abolitionists see it as a horizon to work towards, a North Star to guide our actions in the present. Abolition does not preclude reform that makes people’s lives better in the present, such as putting pressure on elected officials to enforce disciplinary sanctions on abusive officers. Abolitionists argue that it is not enough to simply ameliorate current conditions to create a less destructive police force. Even when officers are well-intentioned and personally hope to help society, they still implement laws which criminalise the poor and defend corporate greed.
Ideas of abolition follow a principle that was first expressed by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or ‘Wobblies’, who gained a reputation for global militancy in the early 20th century. Both groups cherish the tenet of ‘building a new world in the shell of the old’. They do not see the world in terms of a purist dichotomy of reform versus revolution. Their principles are the achievement of pragmatic short-term goals, including winning concessions from authority, while simultaneously building alternative forms of counter-power that are worker and community controlled.
In the 21st century, abolition’s influence is reflected in dispersed power’, as observed in social movements in Latin America. In countries like Bolivia and Venezuela, these movements have combined building counter-power, in the form of community self-defence structures, while also offering support to progressive candidates in elections. They retain a critical view of the state and their support can be withdrawn at any time. This is intended to avoid a fate similar to the UDF in South Africa, where the ANC pressured a non-state organ of popular power to dissolve. Community movements in Venezuela organised to resist a right-wing coup against the government of Hugo Chávez, but also protested against the same government’s track record of police brutality.
Another vision of the future is being built amidst the ruins of the Syrian civil war, in the autonomous Rojava region. While fighting ISIS and the Turkish government, the region has built a political system of democratic confederalism explicitly based on direct democracy, feminism, ecology and ethnic pluralism. Public safety has been divided into the Asayish (their internal security forces) and the municipal Civil Defence Force (HPC). The Asayish carry out police activities, like conducting traffic and guarding government buildings. The HPC are ordinary people who are given weapons training and conflict resolution skills, and only patrol their own neighbourhoods. There is an explicit focus on empowering women, with both organisations having a quota of at least 40 percent female members.
Rojava is an experiment in democratic policing, which both responds to the daily threats of terror attacks and crimes, while avoiding the authoritarian class domination that has historically been associated with the nation-state. As Kurdish scholar Hawzhin Azeez writes:
Through this alternative method, the possibility of instituting hierarchies of power and authority are considerably reduced. The people are protecting themselves. Security forces protect those who they live with and interact with daily in the neighbourhood. This proximity ensures that violations occur only rarely. When they do occur, the neighbourhood communes immediately activate community mechanisms of justice, honour and restoration.
Instead of police or private forces using intimidation and fear, ‘seeing the matriarchs of a neighbourhood standing confidently at street corners wielding AK-47 rifles for the people’s protection’ inspires ‘communal confidence, pride, dignity, self-respect and belonging’.
The withdrawal of the Syrian state in Rojava did not lead to chaos and enclave politics, but a collective project of building democratic governance from the ground up. This is the essence of abolitionist politics. Far from being a nihilistic call to smash existing institutions, it is a constructive project of dispersing power and self-defence throughout society. Abolition is not a fixed political program and conceptual toolbox to be unilaterally applied across different contexts. Instead, it is an ever-evolving body of thought, requiring experimentation and testing in reality.
A common question posed to abolitionists is, ‘Who will people call if they are subjected to domestic assault or a robbery?’ Or what if the victim of a crime doesn’t want any restitution from someone who has grievously harmed them? What if a victim prefers for the perpetrator to be imprisoned? These are important considerations. Abolitionist arguments do not present us as living in a humanist utopia where everyone is a rational actor, but in the real world where abusers, bandits, gangs and marauding religious armies are daily realities. Abolition does not necessarily mean that all public safety initiatives or the incarceration of dangerous individuals disappear overnight. Nor does it mean scolding people because they may have no choice but to call SAPS or private security because there are currently no existing alternatives to them. Abolition argues for more effective societal responses, which don’t rely on our only protection being armed groups that are answerable to distant state and corporate power structures.
This is especially pertinent for the South African context, where US media dominance and the rise of online clicktivism means that the concept of abolition can be reduced to a simplistic slogan paraded for social clout rather than seriously investigated and discussed. North American literature and social movements undoubtedly offer powerful insights applicable to South African problems, particularly on the internationalisation of race, class and militarised police. However, our social reality of mass unemployment, informal settlements, colonial statism and the blurring between legal politics and criminal racketeering highlight that we are closer to the Latin American context and other regions of the Global South.
Yet, South Africa still retains an isolationist perspective, which imagines the country as separate from the rest of Africa and the wider Global South. We unconsciously see ourselves as a part of a vaguely defined Anglosphere. Accepting that we are an impoverished country — albeit with enormous concentrations of wealth — can provide more pragmatic and practical solutions to policing and crime that do not require vast spending or Northern ‘experts’.
Seeing abolitionism as a living politic, not just a set of pop slogans, also means tailoring ideas and campaigns for the domestic context. For example, the abolitionist argument that many crime and violence problems would be better addressed by other organs of the state apart from SAPS is something which could gain popular traction and become seen as common sense. Greater spending on social safety networks and basic infrastructure, such as street lighting and better regulation of public space, are incontrovertible goods that would both provide immediate benefits and contribute towards greater collective safety.
However, the concept of ‘defunding the police’, eloquently outlined by American activists, may lack the same cachet in South Africa. Calls for defunding in the US accurately reflect how police departments have received funding at the expense of other social services, with money poured into military-grade weapons and SWAT teams used to respond to minor disputes and petty crime. In South Africa, apartheid’s legacy resulted in many police stations that are chronically underfunded and understaffed, leading to persistent complaints by township residents that there are no resources and officers to investigate serious crimes. According to United Nations data on intentional homicide, which look at deaths per 100,000 individuals per year, the US has a homicide rate of 6.3 a year as of 2020. In stark contrast, South Africa in 2020 had a rate of 33.3 a year, ranking as one of the highest reported murder rates in the world. These differences will mean that abolition in this country will have to look different to abolition in other places.
The Khayelitsha Commission of Inquiry, which looked into tensions between the police and people living in the Cape Town township, revealed a substantial lack of spending, with only three police stations active in a massive urban area, estimated to have two million inhabitants in 2020. Residents complained in their testimonies about rude and disinterested officers, and called for more government resources to address spiralling murder and theft rates. This reflects a popular desire for a capable state, which means that defunding could be viewed as counterintuitive or the wrong path for our context. However, in light of our troubled history, the abolitionist horizon should not be abandoned. Questions of reform and alternatives should be calibrated with sensitivity and nuance distinct to the violence ordinary South Africans grapple with.
Extract provided by Efemia Chela on behalf of Inkani Books