Cape Town after Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City

4. The Weight of Policing on the Fragile Ground of Transformation

123 4 TheWeight of Policing on the Fragile Ground ofTransformation The policing of township communities has always been central to the governance of the urban poor in Cape Town and is therefore central to understanding how the insecurity of the periphery is reproduced. The following chapter thus examines some of the consequences of hard policing for the fight against crime and gangs and for township communities. Proponents of the law enforcement approach have an almost singular focus on crime rates, and this is where the discussion here begins. Crime rates, however, are only one aspect of the security equation; at least as important are the immediate and long-term effects of hard policing on communities more broadly, and its ability to prepare the ground for future development, as per the governance strategy the city has embraced for more than a decade. The discussion of crime rates is therefore followed by a closer look at the realities behind the statistics: complaints of police misconduct, interactions between police and young men in the townships, the institutionalization of hard policing via the embrace of “international best practices,” and finally, the related lack of effective social crime prevention strategies. Taken together, policing in the townships is in effect reinforcing the wedge that exists between police and residents, deepening mistrust and cynicism and eroding the ground in which genuine long-term crime prevention, and therefore social development, could potentially take root. Instead, Cape Town’s peripheries are plagued by a harsh, if erratic and partial, form of policing, which has a questionable impact on many serious crimes and a negative impact on others while further insinuating violence into the fabric of everyday life. Policing of the townships is the counterpoint to neoliberal governance of security in the city center. It contributes to the reproduction of the conditions of insecurity from which it draws its legitimacy, both actively (e.g., in further marginalizing township residents) and passively 124 · The WeiGhT oF PolicinG on The FraGile Ground oF TransFormaTion (e.g., neglecting genuine security for township residents). Instead of withering away or being dismantled after 1994, the old form of policing has been absorbed into and is now articulated through the structures and processes of neoliberal governance. The neoliberal dimensions of this policing and its consequences are found in discursive and spatial articulations where they are framed as necessary to protect fragile growth and national/municipal images. They are legitimated through reference to the “best practices” of liberal democracies, and often hidden from view through their implementation across the particular geography bequeathed by apartheid, all the while being quietly celebrated by boosters of Cape Town as a world-class city. The consequences of this approach to the governance of security are directly linked to very old and very local as well as to the authoritative power of transnational approaches that are a hallmark of reclaimed world-class city spaces and cutting-edge neoliberal urbanism. The implications of hard Policing for crime and Gangsterism on the cape Flats The success of vigilante campaigns of the People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD) helped to legitimize and institutionalize a standard operating procedure for anticrime units based in special counterterrorism operations.1 They therefore form an important backdrop to the emergence of a war on crime in the Cape and the insertion of these specific law enforcement approaches into the center of postapartheid urban renewal programs, themselves centered on anticrime and antigangsterism measures. As the previous chapter demonstrated, the war on crime did not suddenly emerge so much as evolve over almost a decade of special operations that functioned along military lines from the start and often included military forces. It is not altogether surprising, then, that law enforcement and many government officials continue to evince scepticism or even hostility toward policing reform along progressive lines meant to displace traditional approaches. The benefits of social crime prevention can be somewhat slow to reveal themselves and may even be indirect from the perspective of measures such as annual crime rates. Unlike cordon and search operations, social crime prevention is also unlikely to attract significant media attention because it generally does not involve newsworthy events and its effects on crime rates are difficult to measure.2 The anti-PAGAD operations, on the other hand, were highly visible and highly The WeiGhT oF PolicinG on The FraGile Ground oF TransFormaTion · 125 effective in diffusing the organized violence of the vigilante group. They...