Blaming militarisation for police brutality is aiming at the wrong target
The death of Mozambican taxi driver Mido Macia after being dragged behind a police van in Daveyton has again focused attention on the problem of police brutality. Questions are being asked about whether this misconduct can be linked to the recent ‘militarisation' of the South African Police Service (SAPS). For example, former Minister of Intelligence, Ronnie Kasrils, in a letter to the Mail & Guardian on 6 March 2013, blames the ‘banana-state militarisation of the police' for police brutality. Jenny Schreiner, Director-General in the Department of Economic Development, is quoted in the IOL of 8 March 2013 as having called for ‘the urgent demilitarisation of the police force'.
The Daveyton incident happened on 26 February 2013 in full view of a large group of onlookers, some of whom captured it on video. This came in the wake of a number of other widely publicised cases involving excessive use of force by the police and similar exposure through video footage.
The most pertinent of these were the killing of Andries Tatane during a service delivery protest march in Ficksburg on 13 April 2011 and the killing of 34 striking mineworkers at Marikana's Lonmin mine on 16 August 2012. The shocking video images of these incidents of police brutality sparked a renewed debate on whether these abuses can be linked to the militarisation of the police.
While the prevalence of unacceptable levels of police brutality is not in dispute, arguments about police militarisation as the cause of the problem are less convincing. It is necessary to consider what is meant by police militarism and how it relates to the functions and powers of the police. When trying to understand the causes of police brutality, it is also necessary to look objectively at statistics and other information before simply blaming it on police militarisation.
All police agencies, in varying degrees, exhibit elements of militarism as discussed in ISS Today on 14 September 2010 (see here). Where police agencies such as that of the United Kingdom sought to change this in the 1980s by, for example, replacing the term ‘force' with ‘service', the result was largely superficial and has had very little practical value.