Fuck Up?: How South African Police and Policing Experts Explain Police Killing

• In Event: Trust the Police? How Attitudes about the Police and Their Violence Are Made

Abstract

In August 2012, South African police killed thirty-four striking mine workers at a Lonmin-owned platinum mine about an hour west of Pretoria. The massacre was the largest act of state violence since the end of apartheid. That massacre occurred during an operation to break the strike and bring the mine workers under control. The operation used armored police vehicles to unfurl razor wire around a hill where the miners had taken refuge with the goal of trapping them inside an enclosure where they could then be disarmed and arrested. However, having been warned about the impending plan, the miners fled the hill to avoid entrapment. One group of miners, carrying traditional weapons like clubs and spears, was pushed toward a line of heavily armed officers, while a second took refuge amidst a distant rocky outcrop. Police fired upon each group, killing seventeen men at each scene.

The police decision to encircle the hill is widely seen as the event that precipitated the massacre. Yet despite the bloodshed, whether the plan was sound, whether it was effectively executed, and whether the killings were legal remains debated ten years after the massacre. One result has been that there have been no arrests of police officers for the violence that day. Focusing particularly on the accounts of police commanders and police violence experts, this paper asks: how have different actors made sense of the violence? What do disputes about this violence tell us about how police violence is explained generally? And what do those explanations overlook in their causal assumptions?

The paper shows that for police commanders the decision to encircle the hill represented a necessary response to a large, unruly, and dangerously armed crowd. By contrast, independent policing experts examined the decision as a technical matter, suggesting that the plan was so poorly conceived and executed, it was almost certain to lead to bloodshed. The paper then attempts to move beyond this impasse to consider what this debate reveals about underlying logics of crowd control policing and to uncover assumptions about why crowds need to be policed in the first place.

In doing so, the paper asks what each side’s focus on the technicalities of this plan obscures about other precipitating factors that may have led to the bloodshed. Contrary to both the police and policing experts, it argues that rather than the crowd’s inherent unruliness or poor planning, a crucial precipitating factor may have been initial attempts to police the crowd ten days before the massacre, which led to earlier violence and heightened the stakes for all actors on the day the police decided to break the strike, that may have precipitated the bloodshed.

The argument has ramifications for what it means to police people making demands for a better life, like the impoverished strikers. It also considers why crowds making demands for material improvements in their living conditions need to be policed in the first place – a common problem across the world where the police are typically the first state agency to encounter such crowds and their political demands.

To make these arguments, this paper examines thousands of pages of testimony from police officials and policing experts at a multi-year commission of inquiry that followed the massacre. In examining the police and expert testimonies, the paper asks about the causal assumptions that lay behind each group’s approach to the same evidence and suggests how they came to diametrically opposed conclusions. It also asks how these assumptions may blind each group to alternative explanations of the massacre.

Author

• Nicholas Rush Smith, CUNY-City College