Confronting the power of the police - Accountability, insofar as it ever existed in the South African Police Service, has been reduced to a theoretical concept. It is time this changed.
We clearly have a police service that acts as if it is almost incapable of doing the work of policing without violence and brutality, but it also clearly reserves that violence and brutality for selected victims. It repeatedly targets those who are already at the sharp end of state-sanctioned violence and the violence of neglect and ambivalence from the government that is meant to serve them.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, it is a police service that is often complicit with forms of criminal violence, demonstrated inWhen police power is confronted by those who have the resources, time, and legal backing to see those confrontations through, it can be held to account and it can be forced to compensate those it victimises.
But where the victims are those who capitalism and state-sanctioned police power deem to be dispensable, accountability of any kind is desperately difficult to come by.may one day be brought against the police officers who shot and killed 34 people in Marikana on 16 August 2012 but the cases of Mthokozisi Ntumba, Andries Tatane and so many others are a solemn reminder that challenging police power does not always bring justice.
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