Johannesburg - Between 2000 and 2004 four people were killed by police during demonstrations in South Africa, according to the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation.
In the last three weeks alone, six people – one just 15 years old – suffered the same fate at the hands of the police in Relela, and Bolebodu in Limpopo, Durban Deep in Roodepoort and Mothutlung in Brits.
Their deaths come as national police commissioner General Riah Phiyega and her top management in the North West stand before the Farlam Commission of Inquiry justifying the killing of 34 protesting miners in Marikana 17 months ago.
And it follows widespread outrage at the close-range shooting of teacher Andries Tatane in Ficksburg in 2011.
More important, this sharp increase in the death of protesters at the hands of the police has once again brought the police’s challenges in public order policing and crowd control into the spotlight.
Earlier this week Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa stepped up to defend his officers, saying they were well-trained and that training had been benchmarked with some of the developed nations of the world.
Unisa School of Police Practice professor Rudolph Zinn disagrees.
His reading of the situation is that unless police officers at the country’s police stations are trained in crowd control and public order policing, similar scenes will continue playing out.
“Over the last number of years, the number of protest actions increased quite considerably. So did the number of violent protests,” he said.
“We will definitely see in the run-up to elections an increase in service delivery protests.
“It’s part of the politics and some of the people who engage in service delivery protests have genuine concerns.”
Police, however, needed to understand how to deal with each of the confrontations, said Zinn.
Analysing footage that is available of violent protests, shows that police are unprepared to deal with incidents.
“You can see they are not using the correct formations. They revert to self-defence and firearm use too quickly. And there is no clear person in control of a specific block to give orders. It is a disorganised action.”
Zinn said the police’s first reaction in instances of violent protests was to send members from the police station into the area who were not trained in crowd control and did not have the necessary equipment.
“Most of the violence in a protest takes place within the first 48 hours before the specialised units come on board.
“Officers at station level need to have the correct equipment. Most likely, these officers feel very exposed and physically under threat,” he said.
“(Over the last three years) police management needed to have identified the new, developing trend and put in place budget, planning and training.
“It is a skill that police officers will have to be trained in. Crowd control is a volatile and dangerous job.”
Part of the problem, said Zinn, was that in 2006 police management decided to reduce the number of public order policing units and scaled down on the equipment and vehicles.
And for police management to now roll out a crowd control course at large is difficult because there are limited training facilities and all are running at full capacity for normal policing.
Sean Tait and Monique Marks, in a paper for the Institute for Security Studies three years ago, elaborated on the capacity problem.
“For a number of years after the (The Regulation of Gatherings Act) was promulgated, violence associated with mass demonstrations was reduced to virtually nil. Yet this is no longer the case.
“There are many explanations for why this shift has occurred. These include the way in which gatherings are managed; deficits in the system of notification; the role played by the police; the lack of capacity of local authorities; the way intelligence is monitored; and the lack of capacity of the police responsible for public order policing to negotiate with protesters,” the paper said.
In an interview with The Sunday Independent, Tait – who is the director of the African Policing Civilian Oversight Forum – said there had been very little improvement in public order policing since the Marikana massacre.
“There should be a considerable focus on the negotiation of potential conflict and avoiding the use of live ammunition.
“Public order policing requires a structured, focused effort,” said Tait.
“From Brits to Limpopo, it is not happening. They are not aware of the potential for conflict. The mediation efforts seem to be weak. If police officers are trained adequately in mediation and negotiation, I doubt they would act like that.”
In their paper, Tait and Marks said strong-arm tactics by the police, while effective at stopping physical disorder in the short term, were likely to reinforce the alienation and mistrust that certain more-marginalised sectors of the public feel toward the police.
Tait’s more pressing question was why the police at station level had a weak relationship with the communities they serve.
“These police stations are embedded in communities. There should have been a process in place to engage with the community. Instead they are seemingly caught off guard,” he said.
“Do police feel so under threat from the community? Has their authority been so eroded? Is there nothing of that authority or relationship?” Tait asked.
He described it as a worrying situation.
“There have been a lot of changes in the public ordering policing environment, which created uncertainty.
“There is a need for police management to think through this and think of more appropriate strategies. We need to relook at what we are doing about community policing. They have not acknowledged the crisis they are in,” said Tait.
Sunday Independent