Out on the street the students were confronted by the South African Police force (SAP). Teargas was followed by gunfire. Young bodies fell; cameras clicked<\/a>. The apartheid system was shaken irrevocably.<\/p>\n Youth Day takes its name from the energy and courage of those young learners. But had the police not responded as they did, 16 June might simply be another winter\u2019s day. Police work is practical and symbolic. Through interactions with police, the state communicates with its public. In 1976, police actions embodied the unjust, indefensible and violent state attitude towards black citizens.<\/p>\n It exposed, in ways not seen since the Sharpeville<\/a> massacre on March 21, 1960 the violence through which apartheid was upheld. South Africans remember June 16, 1976 because youth took to the streets, but also because police looked them in the eye and pulled their triggers.<\/p>\n The ripples set in motion by the youth of \u201876 had by the mid-80s<\/a> crippled the economy, led to states of emergency<\/a>, public \u201cunrest\u201d, and international sanctions<\/a> against the apartheid regime.<\/p>\n The early \u201890s saw Nelson Mandela<\/a> freed from prison and liberation movements unbanned<\/a>. The South African Police re-positioned<\/a> itself as an objective arbiter of political tension while being accused of using undercover agents to stoke ethnic violence, at a time when the country recorded its highest ever murder rate.<\/p>\n In 1995, a year before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC<\/a>), the police service merged<\/a> with the 10 Bantustan<\/a> police agencies to form a single South African Police Service (SAPS). Civilian ranks<\/a> replaced military, and mustard-coloured vehicles were painted cloud-white.<\/p>\n Training curricula<\/a> were revised to embrace human rights, and \u201ccommunity policing<\/a>\u201d was imported from the wealthy West. Transformation policies<\/a> saw black members and women rising through the ranks rapidly. All the while, the TRC shone a light on the SAP\u2019s torture farms<\/a>, as well as on the detention camps<\/a> of the liberation movements. It exposed habits of torture<\/a> and murder<\/a>.<\/p>\n Nelson Mandela and his wife Graca Machel attend a ceremony to receive the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report on October 29, 1998. Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n In the run-up to the \u201894 elections, the African National Congress (ANC) believed, perhaps not unexpectedly, that once police were under an elected-ANC\u2019s control, South Africans would accept their authority.<\/p>\n They expected that citizens would accept the criminal law as legitimate and cease the daily violence. This violence had evolved as a product of oppression and as a tool of political resistance, security and punishment in preceding decades<\/a>.<\/p>\n Instead crime and violence spread, sending politicians scrambling. In 1999 then Minister of Safety and Security Steve Tshwete<\/a> declared<\/a> that government would \u201cdeal with criminals in the same way a dog deals with a bone\u201d.<\/p>\n With this posturing the ANC stripped law-breaking<\/a> of the historical, socioeconomic and political overtones through which it had explained violence under apartheid<\/a>, framing \u201ccriminals\u201d instead as bad people who threatened democracy.<\/p>\n In 2000 South Africans were shown precisely how a police dog \u201cdeals with a bone\u201d when video emerged of four white officers and their dogs mauling<\/a> three Mozambican men. It was a reminder that, like its violent crime, the horrors of apartheid policing were not snuffed out by elections.<\/p>\n In response to public anger over crime, the 2000s saw government increase police budgets at rates above inflation. Police ranks swelled to 200 000 and the rhetoric of police \u201cservice\u201d was abandoned in favour of \u201cforce\u201d. Military ranks<\/a> were reintroduced in 2010 amid calls by leaders for police to \u201ckill the [criminal] bastards<\/a>\u201d and \u201cshoot to kill<\/a>\u201d. Some officers have been so emboldened that they have filmed and shared their shootings.<\/p>\n Even the 2012 horrors that happened at the Marikana<\/a> mine, where police shot and killed 34 striking mineworkers, were captured<\/a> on police cell phones. Scenes from that day have become as iconic as those of a dying Hector Pieterson<\/a>, photographed in Soweto 40 years ago this week. Has anything changed?<\/p>\n The SAPS is far from a perfect organisation, but it is not dysfunctional. Many SAPS officers face extreme challenges, like policing a claimed average of 40 protests a day.<\/a><\/p>\n A further challenge is patrolling<\/a> informal settlements without lighting or roads where murders can exceed 100 per 100 000 residents (the global average<\/a> was 6.2 in 2012) and where residents fear attack from neighbours<\/a> if they speak to detectives.<\/p>\n In a country with a 27% unemployment rate<\/a> and where 60% of workers earn less<\/a> than R5 000 a month, a police starting salary of R13 000 is the kind of thing dreams are made of. Of the nearly 200 000 job applications<\/a> received by the SAPS in 2014\/15, just 1.4% (2 827) were successful.<\/p>\n It is in this context that the job is something to be coveted. But this doesn\u2019t necessarily produce professional, integrity-based policing. Rather, many officers \u2013- including the most senior<\/a> \u2013- do what they must to please their managers and present a public image of competence.<\/p>\n For some this means doing the best job they can do, responding<\/a> to people\u2019s needs compassionately and efficiently. But for others it means abusing sex workers<\/a>; shooting without fair warning<\/a>; manipulating<\/a> crime data; torturing<\/a> criminal suspects; (allegedly) assaulting<\/a> vulnerable villagers; even beating a man to death<\/a> for publicly questioning police authority \u2013 when they believe nobody is watching.<\/p>\n It\u2019s an election year<\/a> in South Africa. The opposition Economic Freedom Fighters’ manifesto claims<\/a> that \u201c20 years [into democracy], the police still kill people!\u201d It promises the party will protect street vendors from \u201cpolice harassment\u201d and communities from \u201cintimidation from the police\u201d. That the party believes these promises will win it votes reflects very poorly on the SAPS.<\/p>\n Volunteer for the policeNevertheless, more South Africans are satisfied<\/a> with police than not, even though only 49% trust<\/a> them. Ultimately, South Africans agree<\/a> that to address crime, government should spend money on socioeconomic interventions rather than police. Indeed, what democracy has not yet delivered is an equal country or economy, in the absence of which policing will always likely defend the status quo established by extreme concentrations of power and wealth.<\/p>\n In my many years of working with the SAPS as a volunteer and researcher, most police action I have observed has targeted poor, black men. But one needn\u2019t be a researcher or reservist to know this: Andries Tatane<\/a>, who was killed by police during a service delivery protest, was black and poor, the Marikana workers were black and poor, the residents of Khayelitsha<\/a> (one of Cape Town\u2019s largest and deadliest townships) are overwhelmingly black and poor.<\/p>\n The tragic irony is that, despite their relatively good salaries, many police officers remain poor. Their income is stretched to support networks of vulnerable kin. So while one group of relatively poor men and women police another, a political and economic elite enjoys the fruits of a violently unjust society.<\/p>\n As such, police signal to the country\u2019s vulnerable young men that the state does not trust them. The signals entrench divisions already established by a landscape many young people literally cannot afford the taxi fair to traverse in search of a job in a market which rejects almost half of young job-seekers. All of this happens against the backdrop a welfare system which offers subsidies to almost every category of vulnerable person but for able bodied, unemployed young men.<\/p>\n The South African Police Service is a very different organisation from its apartheid predecessor. And yet, in its actions and inactions, it is at times too easy to see similarities between them. Ultimately, one cannot reform a police service without reforming the context in which it operates. In South Africa, a broken education system continues to trap the poor majority<\/a> in poverty.<\/p>\n Despite huge changes South Africa remains a country of stark, violence-inducing inequalities and injustices, wounds which police officers cannot heal. Instead, through their work they both shepherd and protect, criminalise and abuse the vulnerabilities and struggles of millions of South Africans still waiting for their winter to end.<\/p>\n By\u00a0Andrew Faull\u00a0Senior Researcher at the Centre of Criminology, University of Cape Town<\/em><\/p>\n This article was first published by The Conversation, read the original here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n Local content quotas on TV are global \u2013 they just don\u2019t work everywhere<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n There\u2019s a simple alternative to a sugar tax to fight obesity<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n \u2018Africa time\u2019 is not an excuse to be late<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\nNelson Mandela freed<\/h3>\n
![\"Nelson](\"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Mandela.jpg\")
<\/a>\u201cDog deals with a bone\u201d<\/h3>\n
Police salary a dream<\/h3>\n
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