SAPS, media and the criminalization of the poor in South Africa

Drawing upon her research (with Thulani Fakude) on media coverage of the service delivery protests, Fezani Khumalo asks the following questions: Who is the South African Police Service (SAPS) protecting and how do media represent the police?

I am not the biggest fan of the police, particularly the South African Police Service (SAPS). History proves that police are symbols of destruction and conflict. Protests and demonstrations have become a popular form of communicating dissatisfaction. As I was walking downtown during the recent public servants’ strike, I found myself being more afraid of the heavily armed, intimidating SAPS than of the enraged protesters. In a blink of an eye, I was running for safety from a rubber bullet storm. The police seems to perpetuate the violence and unsafety of strikes. Are they not meant to maintain peace?

It is important to not downplay the fact that people have a constitutional right to protest. I began to wonder: could it be that it is the police who stand between the resolving of issues of social dissatisfaction? Would there be more urgency for government to react and respond to protests if there was no violence inflicted onto the unsatisfied and underserved? If their job is to maintain peace, whose peace is their priority? Is it the peace of the government, university management, employers or that of the ordinary people? As long as the communities, workers and students are not satisfied, there is no peace for them.

In the media, the police continue to be constructed as the heroes and as a short-term solution to protests. They are the ones that help the government delay their response to the peoples’ needs. They dismiss strikes through the use of violent and life-threatening techniques such as shooting rubber bullets! As people continue to be exploited, the police continue to shoot! In reporting about the police, the media include the voice of the police extensively through numerous quotes in articles. They are very much activated and personalised. The police are always interviewed and report on the strategies that they have used to ‘dissolve’ the ‘aggressive strikers’. The police are portrayed as trustworthy sources of statistics on damage that has been done. They are the only sources of protection against the large number of faceless people taking on the streets in the name of resistance against lack of service delivery. The police are also symbolised as the managers of the protest situation by firing rubber bullets to the ‘criminals who are on the wrong’.

It is, however, very ironic that there are many complaints about corruption and misuse of money by officials but the police does not treat these officials as worth of shooting rubber bullets at. Corruption is a criminal act but the police do not fire rubber bullets at these officials who are committing crimes. This raises the question of social class and power relations and how people are treated differently by the law and other powerful structures according to their socio-economic status. The police are also symbolised as people who were provoked to act in a certain way. This is well demonstrated through the use of words such as ‘Police had to’ and ‘Police fired rubber bullets on Tuesday to break up about 200 protesters’. It gives an idea that the protesters asked for it when they are being shot and arrested. There is a strong element of bias when the media report about the police. They construct them as symbols of peace and enforcing a violence-free strike but by inflicting violence on the protesters. The vocabulary that is used suggests that the police are responding to violent, aggressive and deviant protesters.

They shoot university students, school learners. They shoot nurses and teachers. They shoot soldiers and ordinary citizens. See a video example here of SAPS firing rubber bullets at some protestors:

The SAPS does not shoot at real criminals but at those who continue to be underpaid and underprivileged. We do not hear guns when people get raped, we do not hear guns for drunk driving and we do not hear guns for robbery, murder, battery, domestic violence, corruption! We do not hear them for real crimes but there is an abundant misuse of rubber bullets. There exists a tyranny of the police and justice system and it continues to hang upon anyone who wishes to express dissatisfaction towards the elite. To the ordinary citizen who wants to seek justice, the SAPS is dangerous!

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