Fighting fire with fire BURNS US ALL

In conversation with Suren Pillay

There is much cheering for the tough approach to crime that our new police commissioner, Bheki Cele, brings with him, promising to ‘fight fire with fire'. On a recent visit to Latin America, Suren Pillay witnessed the consequences of this approach in the city of Rio de Janeiro.

The militarisation of crime

We would do well to look at Rio, because it offers more than a lesson in how to samba; it offers  an example of what we might want to avoid doing if we really want to reduce violent crime in South Africa.

We arrived in Rio on a Friday morning, and I headed to the apartment of my host, a colleague at a local university, to drop off my luggage before going on to our meetings. Barely inside his apartment, two blocks away from the famously alluring Copacabana beach, I heard a rapid staccato of gun shots.

Outside, hovering in the sky was a police helicopter, exchanging machine gun fire with someone on the ground. My host, who passionately documents police human-rights violations, was outraged. It turns out that across the road is a hotel, and behind that, invisible to me, was a favela, as the poor areas of Brazil are known. Imagine if you will, implanting a miniature version of the Cape Flats area of Mannenberg smack in the middle of glamorous Camps Bay and you get the picture. At the end of that day, three young men were dead.

Favelas are vibrant, but more or less self-governing neighbourhoods, run by highly organised gangs who coordinate the drug trade, and who often have the police on their payroll. 

Under political pressure, a shoot-to-kill approach adopted by the police some years ago resulted in the gangs seeking to be better armed than the police, setting off an arms race; each side trying to outgun the other. The shootout I witnessed that morning was a typical result.

What the middle class wants...

Since the inhabitants of the favelas, who make up about a quarter of the city's inhabitants, are poor and largely of African descent, the middle class (mostly white), prejudiced by race and class, is happy to turn a blind eye to a police force inclined to dispense punishment without due regard to human-rights concerns, as long as those who live outside the favelas are ‘safe'.

We visited favelas with NGO workers authorised to enter by the local gangs. Young men sat on street corners, lounging but alert sentries, their automatic weapons casually resting by their sides. Young boys worked kites in the skies off rooftops, an efficient communication system immune to electronic surveillance and phone taps.

Not much happens in a favela without the permission of the gangs. They provide welfare support, regulate disputes, and dispense justice. In other words, they do what a government might be expected to do.

The effects of conducting a ‘war on crime' has meant that the inhabitants of the favelas - the poor - often only experience the state in the form of a police force that criminalises them, and their young men in particular. I watched on television one night as police, who had shot a drug dealer dead in a favela, were set upon with bricks and bottles by the community. Waging a war on crime has militarised the situation, and has alienated the poor from the Rio police, and the state.

Faced with little choice, it is easy for gang leaders to become more popular among the poor than politicians. It's an intractable situation that is hard to get out of. Like in any war, attitudes harden, weapons and soldiers are mobilised, hatred becomes entrenched and both sides remain intent on annihilating the other through the only tool they have: force. Day-to-day peace is bought through bribes and corruption. War is bad for markets, even the drug market.

How governments should respond...

President Zuma has shown a refreshing frankness in speaking about issues that the previous political administration would rather not mention. He has bravely acknowledged the challenge of crime in South Africa. And he has appointed a police commissioner who thrives on displaying a boldness in tackling problems.

These are welcomed qualities. While leaders represent the people, at times they must also lead by being able to see above and beyond what many of us might feel or want. Responding to the loudest voices who complain about crime in South Africa is going to mean thinking that we can reduce violent crime by better, tougher and more policing. This is what ‘the public wants to hear'.

But between the policemen and the gangsters exchanging machine gun fire in Rio, I realised that it is unarmed civilians who are caught in the cross fire of a shoot-to-kill policy.

The lesson, learnt by other Brazilian cities like São Paulo and neighbouring Bogotá in Colombia, is that reducing crime only through police force does not lead to feeling safer.

Yes, crime does need an effective criminal justice system and there is much that must be done to improve ours. However fighting crime is also done through blunt weapons like effective schools, role models, social workers, psychologists, jobs and doctors. All of the services and evidence that make a population feel that our lives are valued equally.

Fighting crime in communities like ours also has to contend with an important history: there is a wide divergence between the rules enshrined in the law, and what is socially acceptable in the popular morality of many people who have grown up finding short cuts around the law.

This is something we share with many Latin American countries. In Bogotá in Colombia, under Mayor Antanas Mockus, the priority was given to bringing legal morality and social morality closer, with great success in changing behaviour through social sanction, social shaming and social rewards, rather than only through fear of the law.

This encourages us to be better citizens who are more likely to follow rules because we want to, not because we have to. In their case they reduced homicide dramatically over a ten-year period in the 1990s.

This is not what a hysterical public and very vocal middle class might want to hear. It is not the knee-jerk reaction of responding to violence with violence. It takes longer, is less spectacular, and requires more resources, creativity and human energy.

There are important experiences showing that bold political leaders reveal their mettle in times of crisis by calming the rest of us down and providing the wisdom that guides our collective energies to lasting solutions which make us a better and inclusive society. They don't add fire to the fire. We know that we do have bold leaders. It is time for them to lead.

Suren Pillay is a senior research specialist in the programme on Democracy and Governance. He is part of a team conducting an international comparative study of the effects of violent crime on citizenship in Africa, Asia and Latin America.