Cele’s shoot-to-kill gets tired amid rising crime

When the news broke that Minister of Transport Sindisiwe Chikunga and her blue-light brigade had been robbed at gunpoint on the national highway, the N3, reactions varied from “it’s about time they felt what we feel on a daily basis” to “this is just confirmation that the country is gone, criminals have taken over”.

There is no wrong or right reaction to such an occurrence, but it does point to an almost total collapse in law enforcement.

To put it bluntly, fake cops robbed real cops protecting a member of the national executive.

The temptation to ask “is anyone safe if ministers get robbed” is not misplaced. And the robbery at the president’s farm, Phala Phala, in 2020, the consequences of which nearly toppled him, does show that no-one is safe.

At the heart of this takeover of the country by criminals is their belief that they will not be caught. And that is not a belief borne of their exaggeration of their own sense of criminal skill, it is a belief that comes out of empirical observation of how policing works in South Africa: it does not work.

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And then Police Minister Bheki Cele says: “Ministers must feel the same thing that is felt by ordinary citizens.”

And therein lies SA’s problem: the presence of crime in all sectors of society has become so normalised that it is now accepted that it is okay, as long as the crime is “democratically” distributed, affecting the country’s number one citizen as much as it does the poorest member of society.

This way, it then sounds acceptable when Cele says police cannot respond to violent attacks by criminals by turning up at crime scenes simply armed with bulletproof vests. The pasts couple of months have seen police (especially in KwaZulu-Natal) take out suspected criminal masterminds and drug lords.

Cele’s “shoot to kill/licence to kill” unspoken instruction to the police force is not only populist in approach and plays on the emotions of a battered citizenry, but poses grave dangers for democracy and the law in general.

Shooting first and asking questions later is brilliant if it applied only to citizens that have definitely broken the law and are using violent means to evade arrest.

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But this country has seen enough hit squads in its recent past to know that shooting criminals simply on suspicion creates fear and takes away the rights of ordinary citizens.

Yes, the refrain from societies and citizens who feel the brunt of crime daily is going to be “so criminals must have more rights and protection than citizens?”

Far from it.

As attractive as brute force sounds in the face more than one million households experiencing a house robbery or housebreaking in the 2022- 2023 crime stats, it is smart policing that will bring back a sense of control and safety to ordinary citizens.

They must feel that, in the same way that criminals are inventing new criminal methods every few months, their police force and crime intelligence must be establishing new and innovative ways of catching those criminals.

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Kidnappings and robbery of senior citizens by forcibly taking them from public places like malls have been on the rise for the past few years.

Cele’s shoot-to-kill approach will not stop the rise of this kind of crime.

Cele’s focus should be on restoring Crime Intelligence and knowing when and where to deploy police in the right numbers.

Can they use brute force and take out “known” criminals when they are under attack?

For sure. But brute force cannot replace smart intelligent policing.

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