When police shot dead bands of criminals in various parts of KwaZulu-Natal, members of the community, at their wits’ end because of terror unleashed by small-town gangs, cheered them on.
It is a reaction from a people neither given to worshipping gangsters nor condoning summary executions. It’s cheers from a place of hurt, from communities long subjected to localised violence and intimidation that includes robberies, theft, assaults, rapes, murders, break-ins, extortions and lives that could only be described as hell on earth.
Much of this is fuelled by young people barely out of their teens but whose conscience long escaped them. They have become brutal not because they are brave, but because they have seen the power their easily obtainable guns give them.
The police have belatedly decided to meet fire with fire and, assisted by intelligence, have wiped out several gangs — with ululations from a weary public.
The latest is the police’s killing of nine gang members in Mariannhill, KwaZulu-Natal, this week. TimesLIVE reported police minister Bheki Cele saying the gang was linked to 26 cases in the area. The cases include 23 house robberies, murder, rape and attempted murder. The gang is alleged to have raped a 24-year-old in front of her mother. Several neighbours of the criminals' den vacated their houses to escape the regular effrontery. The mother later told TimesLIVE she was relieved her daughter’s rapists no longer walked the earth.
The shoot-out that left 11 dead follow police killing three others in Eshowe, on the KwaZulu-Natal north coast. In Clermont, a cop killer was summarily killed by police a week ago. Another involved the killing of four men in Cato Manor by the KwaZulu-Natal provincial stabilisation team. In total, just over 50 people were killed in shoot-outs with police in KwaZulu-Natal alone since October 2023. The number, since January, is 24.
The question on many people’s minds is: Have police become trigger happy? Are they, in addition to being investigators, also prosecutors, judges and hangmen at the same time? Could the violence they unleash against violent gangs still be deemed justice?
In return, the police get high praise from the eminence grise of the police, Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, the KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner, and their hawkish police minister Cele who said after the killing in Mariannhill: “We support the police, and the police have done what they were supposed to do to protect themselves and the community around here. Police in this province and nationally are on top of the situation, and we will continue to work that way.”
Decoded, Cele is saying police were right to kill and believes it was in self defence and they should continue to do this. Chilling.
While the elimination of suspects seems to get tacit community approval and applause from Cele, it also seems regularised and frequent, subverting the normal procedure in the justice process. The public never gets to find out if all those killed are indeed guilty of crimes associated with them. Even if so, questions will linger if they all deserved what seems summary executions.
The question on many people’s minds is: Have police become trigger happy? Are they, in addition to being investigators, also prosecutors, judges and hangmen at the same time? Could the violence they unleash against violent gangs still be deemed justice?
VIOLENT CONTEXT
But first, why are the police forced to react with violence? Our country’s history is steeped in hair-raising violence.
When the history of the Zulu people is told, for example, they are projected as bloodthirsty, spear-wielding people given to fights at the slightest provocation. The many versions of King Shaka’s history invariably portray him as a warrior. Nothing benign. If a strategist, then one involved in military action.
But this violence is neither a KwaZulu-Natal nor a black problem — it’s a South African problem. Further, if you look at violence through a political prism, it becomes denuded of race or borders. The very history of colonialism is a history of violence. British conquests involved malevolent violence. The violence we mete out against each other knows no bounds.
At the height of apartheid, white men hunted freedom fighters with mind-numbing barbarism. Violence became a tool of control to ensure the continued subjugation of the oppressed black majority. Even askari Joe Mamasela described as “the most brutal thing I have ever witnessed” the squeezing by police officer Gert Beeslaar of freedom fighter Champion Galela’s testicles until they became the size of golf balls and then punched them, killing the member of what was termed the Pebco Three. Even those who yearned for freedom and democracy used tyres and petrol to burn informers. There was no just process or a synthesis of evidence.
The dawn of democracy was meant to help create an ecosystem that encouraged justice to take root. But given the torpid pace of justice, some use guns to eliminate each other. The police struggled then — and still do — to eliminate rampant criminality. Violence has become part of our fabric, our way of doing things.
You differ politically, you resort to violence. You differ on taxi routes; violence is your crutch. You don’t get a tender because you don’t qualify, you use violence to get your way. Violence is rightly condemned, for it gnaws away at our humanity, yet it is institutionalised, especially in the taxi sector and our politics. It’s part of our social order — where a parallel universe and a different way of resolving conflict exists.
Unchanging socioeconomic economic factors seem to encourage a portion of society to use guns to secure a life they initially believed beyond their grasp.
Democracy was also meant to yield fruits of liberation for those trapped in poverty. Unchanging socioeconomic economic factors seem to encourage a portion of society to use guns to secure a life they initially believed beyond their grasp.
In a 2017 research for the World Bank Group titled The socioeconomic determinants of crime in South Africa: An empirical assessment, the researchers Haroon Bhorat, Adaiah Lilenstein, Jabulile Monnakgotla, Amy Thornton and Kirsten van der Zee say socioeconomic challenges are significant determinants of crime.
The researchers note the existence of “great disparities in poverty levels across racial groups, with a vast majority of Africans living below the poverty line, followed by Coloureds. There can be no doubt that a significant proportion of people living in the country are struggling to meet their basic survival needs.”
They conclude: “The motivations behind violent crime are more complex and psychological than those behind resource acquisition crime (like robberies and house-breaking). Violent crime increases and then decreases with income, but there is no relationship with inequality” while one’s poverty could lead to their participation in resource acquisition crime.
Homelessness and food poverty are themselves forms of violence that drive people to extremes. The helplessness and hopelessness together with easy access to guns lead people to adventurism with some believing it's either they unleash terror on those who seem to have resources, including their hemmed-in neighbours, or they must be killed trying. US rapper 50 Cent captured the sentiment in his 2003 debut album Get Rich or Die Tryin’. Tupac said it was “me against the world”. Skizzy Mars, another rapper, captured what gangs do after a few robberies: “It’s Monday morning, but we treat it like a Friday.”
THE ECONOMICS OF CRIME
Many of those who commit crime are not poor. But there’s no gainsaying the fact that poverty and hopelessness generate a fair share of gun-toting hoodlums. Some may start out as poor criminals engaged in petty crimes for survival.
But they do graduate, as it were, to more organised forms of violence from which they now feed their insatiable greed. They rob, rape and extort. Those who bomb cash-in-transit vehicles, for example, aren’t without means.
Some spend their money not at the local shebeens but at exclusive, five-star hotels. The police exchange of fire power, for example, with Nkululeko Mkhize at luxurious Zimbali Estate in Ballito proves the point.
When criminals start behaving like Mkhize, they’re not motivated by poverty and lack. They’ve tasted the good life and believe their guns are licences to amass more, to unleash more terror. No police officer will stand in their way of this life initially believed unattainable but now found addictive to these merchants of death. This is why, in part, 24 officers were killed since the beginning of the year.
Further, while poverty may contribute to increased crime levels, crime stunts economic growth which, in turn, leads to more poverty and a repeated cycle of crime and poverty.
While poverty may contribute to increased crime levels, crime stunts economic growth which, in turn, leads to more poverty and a repeated cycle of crime and poverty.
But the question remains: are our cops trigger happy or are they now emboldened to take the war to those who have been terrorising community members and who will not think twice about killing cops?
Cele says police “are not just trigger-happy to shoot anybody. Ipid will report when they finish their report, and I will not pre-empt what their report (on Mariannhill killings) will say.”
But the father of one of the men killed in Mariannhill believes otherwise. “My son Andile and his associates had visited my house here. I got a call (while away because of work) that everyone had been killed in the house,” the father told Cele during a community engagement. “What pains me the most is that there are reports that they were shooting at the police. Yes, he had some bad friends who were criminals and did all kinds of robberies. However, it would have been better if they were arrested because, to my knowledge, they were not fighting but were just shot by the police.”
When the police shot dead 18 suspected cash-in-transit robbers at a house in Makhado in Limpopo, they, like in Mariannhill, left no one alive. “They killed even the gardener who just happened to have been in that house at the time the police unleashed fire power,” a source connected to the family said.
Another source however said the criminals killed by police should not be viewed as normal people against whom conventional policing methods must be applied.
“Truth is once petty criminals kill, there’s something about their humanity that is taken away from them. They become emboldened. They care less. They become inseparable from their guns. If you’re an officer investigating them, their point of departure is that you should be killed. Simple. So when the police arrive in their numbers and surround these people’s houses, the natural response is to open fire at police. To argue that police must say to the suspects surrender and we are not leaving here until you run out of bullets that’s, well, what happens in the movies. Our reality is different.”
DEADLY CYCLE
Theoretically, police must arrest suspects and present them to the criminal justice system and hope, if they’re found guilty, the correctional services will help ensure they do not recede. But some of these gang members operate in a parallel universe where either they or the police live. Never both. Mkhwanazi’s options seem limited.
Yet the current approach where police kill everyone they find in the house seems patently wrong and runs counter to the constitutional injunction of the sanctity of life. The limitation with the use of violence is that factors that, in the first place, led to the formation of gangs who are eliminated through police brutality will spawn new gangs. It means Mkhwanazi and his killer cops must keep on killing — even with ululations from those tired of crime — but the problem won’t go away.
And crime — petty or organised — is an offshoot of society’s dysfunction and an unwelcome inheritance from our past. It is as much about failed parenting as it is about a failing economy that continues to marginalise and thus incubate teenagers into petty criminals who steal to survive until some of them become, like Mkhize and others, captive to their greed.
Expecting police to resolve crime without a concomitant focus on socioeconomic factors is to kick the can down the road and hope for the best. Einstein called it insanity.
• This is part one of three
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