EUSEBIUS MCKAISER | Wade into the treacherous waters with a revolutionary cop

Jeremy Vearey was offered a blowjob by a sex worker who had flagged him down along Main Road in Claremont, Cape Town. She was not fazed that he was wearing uniform and asked him, nonchalantly: “Can I suck you?” When he expressed shock at her audacity, she made it clear that many police officers were her clients. She was nonplussed. This is one of countless stories Vearey tells in his fascinating second book, Into Dark Water — A Police Memoir. It is an excellent follow-up on his first effort, Jeremy vannie Elsies. I do not like the subtitle of his second book — A Police Memoir — because it is so much more than that, a quietly incisive, efficient set of real stories and reflections on the connections between criminality, history, politics and multiple physical and psychosocial geographies on which our lives play out. 

In a book interview with me, he reflected on this Claremont encounter. Without even hesitating, he answered in the affirmative when I asked: “Should sex work be decriminalised?” He is profoundly committed to law enforcement, but as a political animal and an anti-apartheid struggle veteran, he does not shy away from engaging in normative debate about social policy. Both in our podcast conversation and in his book, he reflects on the hypocrisy of law enforcement officers when it comes to policing sex work. Many police officers, he says, use the services of sex workers. In fact, many of the cases that are brought against sex workers collapse in court because most police officers are unable to keep a straight face, sit comfortably and factually recount in detail seeing two adults having sex. Their moral conservatism, mixed with the chokehold of hypocrisy, results in them being poor state witnesses. This, says Vearey, makes policing sex work an utter waste of police resources. He prefers focusing on the real threats to the state and within our communities.

Criminality on the Cape Flats is heart-wrenching. Poor and working-class neighbourhoods are socially, economically, politically and geographically on the margins of Cape Town life. We have still not publicly archived all the stories of life in parts of Cape Town that do not make it onto tourism websites. This leads to discursive marginalisation. Into Dark Water helps to fill that gap. Vearey illuminates, for example, criminal enterprises on the Cape Flats, the ubiquitous and ongoing presence of gangsters who make life a nightmare for innocent residents caught in their deadly turf wars.

Into Dark Waters spans many themes worthy of reader excavation. Reading is intersubjective. We each pause over the material that connects with the unique facts about our individual selves or with our particular subject interests.

He writes of one such innocent victim: “A barrage of gunshots whizzed overhead. Unless they were aimed at us, these rooftop volleys posed no risk. We ducked and dashed across a field between the tenements of the warring Americans and Ghetto Kids gangs in Hanover Park, until we found the murder scene. In fetal pose, an eleven-year-old schoolboy clutched a loaf of bread. He had bled out fast in the time it took us to get there. His gaze was gaunt and his blood-brimmed mouth stood agape in a frozen cry. And, as usual, no-one saw anything, heard anything or said anything.”

I had asked Vearey, in my interview with him, how he had managed to sculpt such beautiful sentences about such bloody truths and how he appreciated affect while still knowing he needs to “get on with it” as a police officer. One way he did so, in terms of literary technique, was to recall the lessons of one of his writing mentors, who had taught him to accurately reproduce emotion he had felt in an earlier time of his life or to evoke a desired feeling in a reader of one’s work. That is not literary gaming. It is evidence of a police officer who is a serious lover and student of literature, especially poetry. The other reason he could describe this tragic scene so fully, with the dignity of the innocent victim preserved in the description of his death, is because he himself became a father during that time. That juxtaposition of becoming a new dad, while recalling the loss of another parent, stayed with him forever, even though he has seen so many dead bodies in his career that he has lost count.

Vearey and his colleagues solved that ghastly murder case that night. He writes of it: “We solved the case that night and arrested our killer. He mistook the boy for a spotter and shot him in the heat of the chase.” Gangsters do not recognise the right to life. A few sentences later, Vearey describes his experience of the birth of his own child: “I left the room with Bernice in the final throes of birth, her face etched with distant calm that I imagine only comes with passing beyond the pain threshold. I cried silently. Quincy bellowed his arrival early that morning. I ran back to the room to cut the cord and saw both of them smile. We buried his afterbirth and planted a lemon tree on top of it. I wonder who buried the eleven-year-old schoolboy.”

Into Dark Waters spans many themes worthy of reader excavation. Reading is intersubjective. We each pause over the material that connects with the unique facts about our individual selves or with our particular subject interests. I was intrigued by discussion about the nature of criminals. In one chilling but insightful entry, The Distinguished Rapist, Vearey chronicles the story of a highly intelligent and educated serial rapist who used every rape myth to rationalise his criminality. He had also suffered childhood trauma, having witnessed his mother being raped almost daily by his father, and weaponised that trauma in accounting for his own criminal adult behaviour. This story, coupled with another about a mother who killed her own child then joined the community in looking for the missing child, led Vearey and I to discuss the nature of evil.

The rapist, Vearey says, is proof all men are capable of committing rape and that it is mythical to pretend some men are inherently incapable of evil. We often construct ideas of rapists as uniquely evil individuals, perhaps uneducated and lacking in moral reflective capacity, but throughout his career he has encountered sex criminals from all sections of society. His conclusion is that The Distinguished Rapist chose to do evil and that he is evil. The attempt to exculpate his criminality with reference to the antecedent social or personal biographical facts that preceded the crime spree, does not convince Maj-Gen Vearey. Similarly, the mother who killed her child cannot have her evil discounted on account of her fears that a partner would take the child away. She intentionally murdered her own and needs to look her evil self in the mirror and take responsibility for how she exercised her agency. This was the only time in my engagement with Vearey that he did not spend much time in the grey areas between the black and white choices of social determinism and unencumbered individual agency.

I still grapple with where along the spectrum we should locate harmful behaviour from all of us. In a graduate philosophy class, we grappled with philosopher Galen Strawson’s excellent paper, The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility, which is a sceptical and analytical engagement with our colloquial attribution of moral responsibility to one another, attributions that are hard to hold on to once we strip away the contributions to our behaviour that we did not choose. Yet at the same time, our entire moral and legal system, and interpersonal relationships, would quickly be in existential and social trouble if we were not able to act under the guise of assuming we have moral agency. Vearey’s stories about criminality is a rich basis for moral philosophy and legal theory to draw on.

This is the sort of sustained incisiveness we find in this work, whether the author is talking about the double consciousness of playing the role of teacher well to hide his cover as an underground revolutionary, or his instructive stories of how the fight against gangsterism requires a relationship with communities that is not premised on police being the ultimate experts about their precincts. Sadly, we also learn of how corruption and skulduggery within the SA Police Service, and in particular the general politicisation of policing, continues unabated after 1994, at the expense of our collective safety.

Into Dark Water is a billed as a police memoir but is, in the end, a poetic account of injustices in a SA still far from realising the dream of a truly just and equal society.