Police brutality leaves me cold

Hours before my departure for Johannesburg on Tuesday evening, I was still labouring under the illusion that my holiday trip to Port Elizabeth had been very pleasant. Unfortunately, police officers doing a drug bust in Parliament Street in Central spoilt my festive mood. They brazenly assaulted three suspected drug peddlers in the full face of the public glare. As if the assault itself was not illegal and immoral enough, they clearly assumed that all bystanders are vulnerable foreigners who lack the capacity to lay charges against the police officers. They had not banked on an accidentally-embedded analyst.

Drug peddling is, of course, an incredibly serious criminal offense. The police are right to eliminate the social scourge. No doubt many of the peddlers are also dangerous and a tough attitude on the part of the police is therefore not inappropriate.

However, what I witnessed was disturbing.

I was sitting at a local restaurant, Zanzibar, when police vehicles screeched past. The news junkie in me insisted on going outside to see what the commotion was about. I walked about 200 meters to where the police had cornered three men. They were lying on the ground when three police officers – including a female police officer – assaulted them with their rifles. Two of the officers emerged from a police vehicle with registration BRT 056 B. One of the suspected criminals quickly sported a gruesome facial swelling as a result of the assault.

Meanwhile, a white civilian woman –driving a top of the range Mercedes Benz with a child in the back – who appeared to have tried to deal with the suspected drug peddlers were casually allowed to drive off after an exchange of numbers with the police. I took down the number plate details of both the presumably would-be customer and the police officers who committed the assault. I spoke to a number of bystanders who had the exact same understanding of the events as me. Some of them were amused by my disgust – for them this is a daily reality.

Before walking away, I overheard one of the three officers – he was casually dressed, very aggressive and comically stout in appearance – laughing in Afrikaans while boasting to a colleague about showing “them” what xenophobia really means. He recalled earlier in the evening nabbing one of “them” at a nearby corner and kicking him with the greatest possible force while he was lying on the ground and claiming to have no drugs on him.

The incident is disturbing for many reasons.

First, a human rights culture requires the rights of both innocent persons and suspected criminals to be fully respected.

Second, the incident was clearly layered with both racism and xenophobia. The rich white woman, who should have been arrested for purposes of further questioning at the very least, was treated like a police buddy. Black bodies were treated like objects to be assaulted. This was no doubt heightened by the fact that the suspected peddlers appeared foreign.

Third, this undermines relations between the community and the police. If you wish the community to come forward with information that can lead to the arrest of criminals, then it is important that the community have confidence in how you conduct your affairs. This incident does not inspire confidence.

Finally, South Africa need to do much more to affirm the rights of foreigners living within our borders. We have seen too many assaults on foreigners by both ordinary South Africans and the police for too long now. This is in violation of international humanitarian law.

The police are right to be tough on crime. But one cannot help but think back to the dark days of Apartheid when you see an all-white, mostly Afrikaans and sadistically aggressive police unit invading a mostly-black zone and arrogantly and openly assaulting the bodies and rights of real human beings. It leaves me cold.