Police system needs overhaul

The death of 16-year-old Nathaniel Julies on Wednesday night put the township of Eldorado Park on its own kind of lockdown for a couple of days.

Residents demanded justice for the Down syndrome-afflicted boy allegedly killed during his interaction with four members of the South Africa Police Service (Saps).

In the beginning, the official Saps version claimed his death was the result of being caught in crossfire between police and gangsters. It is a version that would have been easy to sell to the rest of the country because of the area’s known gangsterism problem.

The only thing, as it turns out, is the existence of several witnesses, all of whom disputed that version: there was no shoot-out with gangsters that evening. Julies’ death will still be investigated officially by the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (Ipid), but the protests that followed reveal the fault lines that exist between the community and police.

It is clear that were it not for the existence of eyewitnesses to what happened immediately after the shot rang out, a massive cover-up of the real cause of the boy’s death would have been carried out. Contrary to the prevailing community sentiment that theirs is a bullied and forgotten community because it is a coloured one, the relationship of mistrust between the police and that particular community is one that is multiplied many times over in communities all over SA.

The police haven’t covered themselves in glory, especially in the poor communities. The same complaints that the people of Eldorado Park voiced are often repeated in communities hundreds of kilometres away: the police have close – and obviously corrupt – relationships with drug dealers and gangsters, they take forever to respond to serious crimes but have the time to drive around to spots where they’re likely to benefit financially.

There is an uncomfortable intersection between the economic status of a community and the level of police brutality that tends to occur there. Economic high-end suburbs do not tend to invite the sort of police activity that end up in the sort of killings that ended Julies’ life.

The poorer and more congested a township or settlement is, the more likely it is that police’s gun holsters are always undone, with guns ready to go off. The recent waves of protests across the world following the killing of George Floyd in the United States have emboldened some communities to stand up against police brutality.

But the problem in South African society is much deeper than simply investigating one incident thoroughly and hoping it will not happen again. It requires an entire overhaul of the system, with the police having to unlearn what they know about serving in poor communities.

It will take much more than the impromptu appearance of Police Minister Bheki Cele after another poor township resident has been brutally gunned down to set the system right. The overhaul of the system has to be deliberate: police have to be specifically trained to deal with policing in poorer communities, integration of the police service into the communities they serve must be an ongoing process so they never consider themselves targets.

Chances are that Julies’ death will be dealt with as an isolated incident and the case closed after investigations, without any lasting change to the way policing is done because those with the power to effect change have bigger political battles to fight.

But Eldorado Park will be repeated many times over until someone listens.

Sydney Majoko.

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