ARCHIVES: Destroying Democracy Part Eight: The politics of policing: The state’s failure to snare culprits of serious public violence is no accident
The post-apartheid South African state has battled with how to respond to worker and community struggles, moving between using coercion and concessions coupled with limited incorporation into the political system.However, the capitalist downturn from 2008 onwards and subsequent anti-austerity protests and strikes have changed the forms of social control used by the security agencies of the state.
If police and prosecutorial responses to violent protests were proportionate to the levels of threat to public safety and national security, then it could be expected that the number of convictions relative to the number of arrests and prosecutions would be high, as the evidence of crimes having been committed would have been tested in open court and found to be credible.
Owing to the difficulties of achieving prosecutions in protest cases, at that stage the SAPS decided to do away entirely with performance indicators relating to criminal and violent conduct in protests and industrial action. However, most cases against #FeesMustFall activists fizzled out at the prosecutorial stage. Largely, those convictions that were obtained turned out to be not serious at all. This was evident from the fact that the SAPS and the NPA were willing to negotiate around these cases and agree to alternatives to incarceration. Yet, more serious cases of grand public violence remained unsolved.
. International NGO Human Rights Watch criticised the government for its failure to protect foreign truck drivers against attack or mount effective investigations to stop the attacks.By this stage, scores of political assassinations and assassinations of whistle-blowers – which had picked up from 2011 onwards and which had the potential to spiral into domestic instability – remained unsolved, too.
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