FREE TO READ | ANALYSIS | 'While Bheki Cele has since urged them to show compassion, his off-the-cuff initial response was telling,' writes Karyn Maughan
A policeman instructs a man to do push-ups during an operation in Eldorado Park, on the fourth day of a nationwide lockdown.Just more than a week into SA’s Covid-19 shutdown, and there are already troubling signs that the state may be unwittingly creating the circumstances for social upheaval – driven, not by the lockdown itself, but by law enforcement’s often violent attempts to implement it.
It wants law enforcement to be interdicted from engaging in such conduct. It further wants the court to rule that “the State of Disaster as declared by the minister of cooperative governance and traditional affairs under Government Gazette NO. 43096 has not and does not suspend constitutional rights of all South Africans.”
In this context, law enforcement needs to be doing the best it can to mitigate the devastating social impact of the Covid-19 shutdown on the poorest of the poor. orcing members of the public “to do frog jumps for long distances in full view of other people”; hitting people “with fists, sjamboks inside their yards”; shooting them with rubber bullets; kicking and forcing people “to go inside their homes from their yards”; and “roll on the floor in full view of other people”.
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