Appearing before the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee, the Commissioner of the Botswana Police Service (BPS) found himself tongue-tied when asked about the Service’s recent acquisition of sjamboks – whips made of tapered hard rubber that inflict painful welts. The context was police brutality and there is never a shortage of examples to illustrate it.
Two months ago, Sunday Standard reported the story of how the Mahalapye police locked up a youth who had been tortured by a bloodthirsty mob instead of taking him to the hospital. The youth alleges the female police officer who locked him up also slapped him around in the cell area. Reacting to this story online, a reader recounted a traffic stop in which her sickly 92-year old grandmother was tangentially victimised by Gaborone police. Many more readers had their own horror stories to tell about ill-fated encounters with the police because from Ramokgwebana to Ramatlabama, policing has become synonymous with all kinds of brutality. The powers that police officers have are stipulated in the law but as some (especially nocturnal) people will tell you, a single police officer can invest himself with more power than that of the entire SADC summit. Blaming the Commissioner of Police for this situation seems the logical thing to do but the issue is trickier than that.
Police brutality in Botswana ÔÇô as indeed in much of the Commonwealth ÔÇô is the direct result of a political decision that was made by the British parliament in 1822. This is how Sir Charles Jeffries, who was the Under-Secretary of State in the Colonial Office between 1947 and 1956, summarised the issue: “The fact is that the really effective influence on the development of colonial police forces during the 19th century was not that of the police of Great Britain but that of the Royal Irish Constabulary.” The two systems of policing he is referring to were developed by the two-time British Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, during his stint as Home Secretary. The nickname for a British policeman (“bobby”) is derived from the abbreviated form of his first name.
The British Parliament passed the Irish Constabulary Act (which was designed to police hostile Ireland) in 1822. The emphasis of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) model was on “keeping the order” and “maintaining the law” largely through military means. Seven years later, Britain established a local police force through the London Metropolitan Police Act. This model was intentionally different from the military and its mission was focused on prevention of crime rather than repression of disorder. Met policing became the basis for all British forces on the mainland and a major influence on the development of policing in the east coast of the United States in the 1840s. Through it, Peel laid out seven principles all of which were designed to ensure a system of policing that resonated with society’s sense of morality and rationality. One such principle was that the ultimate goal of policing is to achieve voluntary compliance with the law in the community.
Following the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the RIC was disbanded but the Irish policing experience influenced that in Palestine. In turn, Palestine methods influenced colonial policing elsewhere in the British empire from the 1930s onwards. This came after the Colonial Office decreed that policing techniques and training in the British empire should be standardized. At this time, present-day Botswana (then called Bechuanaland Protectorate) was part of that empire. Police personnel essentially enforced laws that protected and advanced the economic and political agenda of the British colonisers.
On becoming independent beginning in 1952, African nations were keen to retain British methods of doing things ÔÇô policing included. Under new independent states, police forces continued to enforce authoritarian rule, further entrenching a culture of violence against citizens. For their police forces, newly independent states stressed little more than knowledge of the foot drill, the most rudimentary knowledge of criminal law and physical fitness. On account of being poorly trained, poorly remunerated and ill-equipped, a good many African police officers were unable to meet the safety and security needs of local communities.
This is the situation that the Botswana Police Service (BPS) finds itself in 51 years after independence. Its policing ideology has not been reoriented in any fundamental way and the cited incidents of cruelty are not isolated but part of a deeply disturbing pattern that has manifested itself over a long period of time.
As stop-question-and-search operations show, BPS has yet to democratize itself. In a country with people of different skin tones, no tone group should ever be singled out for discrimination. The reality though, which was told through the experiences of Dumisani Matiha in an article that the writer did for the Botswana Guardian, is that dark-skinned Batswana are likelier to be stopped, questioned and searched than light-skinned ones. Matiha, a rock musician from North East who stayed in Gaborone then, said that police officers stopped him in the street on a regular basis and assuming he was a foreigner, would ask him to produce a passport.
It is also common knowledge that police are likelier to escalate than de-escalate a confrontational situation. When Botho University descended into chaos in February this year, riot police responded with disproportionate use of force against unarmed demonstrators, chasing and yanking some of those who had fled from parked taxi-buses.
In apparent attempt to move towards a benevolent method of policing, reforms that have been attempted by BPS management appear to be more symbolic than substantive. Some time back, the Service fiddled with its terminology, renaming the dreaded charge office “community centre.” However, all the bad things that happened in charge offices (and in cells) still happen in community centres. There has also been deliberate move towards more civilian involvement in crime prevention through “community policing” that, in one respect, has seen the addition of cluster volunteers to the policing effort. If the police training programme can be conceived in terms of cooking techniques, ordinary constables are slow-cooked for six months, special ones saut├®ed for two weeks and cluster volunteers only microwaved for a couple of hours inside a police station office. There is absolutely no question about whether or not the latter reach the required level of doneness and the difference in training is evident when all these different groups have to work together as a team.
Peel conceived of a style of law enforcement that made sense to the community. During a period of time that BPS touts community policing, it has also launched a massive fundraising campaign on virtually all public roads at the expense of more serious offences. Where use of traffic lights is concerned, it has been reported that motorists and traffic police officers can’t even agree on what particular colours look like: where a motorist sees amber, a police officer sees red and immediately issues a ticket. This decision doesn’t resonate with the community’s sense of rationality and morality, causes dislocation in the relationship between the police and local communities and erodes the trust whose importance Peel stressed.
The tragedy is writ large: the police service of a black African government retains the basic characteristics of a policing model (RIC) that was never meant to be friendly to indigenous Batswana. One necessarily has to make such distinction because like today’s Botswana, Bechuanaland had a serious racism problem which in one respect manifested itself in the way black and white people were policed. On the evidence thus far, black people and white people in Botswana are policed differently. Away on holiday in Kasane, poet Berry Heart and a friend got into an altercation with a white man who made death threats against them. By her account, which was never disputed, the Kasane police were reluctant to open a case against the culprit – who was later found guilty. The man is supposed to have stated that the police wouldn’t take action against him because he is white. A man who has been in the police force for over 25 years says that he has no recollection of white people being stopped, questioned and searched in the aggressive manner that black people like Matiha routinely are. All too often, the severe shortage of cars makes it difficult – if not impossible, to respond to crime reports timeously. However, a Gaborone police officer says that “the issue of car shortage hardly ever arises when a white person in Notwane Farms calls to report a crime.”
Then again, the global policing system was never designed to be friendly to black people anywhere in the world. This is how Dr. Melinah Abdullah, one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) activist movement in the United States, described the history of policing to Russia Today: “The policing system here evolved out of the system of slave patrols. So, our current policing system was actually set up to put black people – cast black people, as the enemies of the state.” This is a description that fits the RIC model perfectly.
A London School of Economics research by Ben Bowling, Alpa Parmar and Coretta Phillips on policing ethnic minorities in Britain found that, in general, whites tend to have a more satisfactory experience of the police “than people whose ancestry lies in Asia, Africa and the islands of the sea.” They found racism and racial prejudice in police culture to be more widespread and more extreme than in wider society, that stop-question-and-search was done on the basis of ethnic origin, that police need to be trained in de-escalation techniques and taught a preference for non-lethal force and that on the basis of pre-existing beliefs about their supposed criminality, black people were subject to extraordinary policing.
“For some commentators, policing British minority ethnic communities was merely an extension of colonial policing which had existed for decades in the Caribbean, India and Africa, and which had now been turned inward to police the ‘domestic colonies’,” the trio notes.
The broader issue here is that the people who designed the western world order never intended for Third Worlders to participate in this order on equal terms. It is not by accident that much of the most agriculturally productive land in Botswana is in white hands.
As described, the policing situation provides justification for making the BLM campaign international because anywhere in the world, police sharpshooters literally have black people in the sights of their rifles. The RIC model gives precise guidance with regard to how a riot should be broken up: riot police are authorised to fire not above the heads of the rioters but right at them. This is how Stewart West, a British colonial officer in Uganda describes his application of this method during a riot in a Ugandan village: “Two shots were fired by myself and a constable. I had seen a man setting fire to a chief’s hut. When he realized he was being watched he broke away and ran in a left to right direction away from the hut. Aiming at his chest, I fired one round at him and he appeared to be hit. However, when we searched the area immediately afterwards there was no sign of him. Later C/ASP Paddy Clancy claimed to have found him and taken him to hospital with a wound in his upper leg.” This was colonial Uganda in 1960 and West was following a riot-control protocol that BPS still uses in 2017.
In addition to rubber bullets, BPS has just acquired sjamboks whose use was discontinued in the last century by the apartheid-era South African Police Service on the orders of then Acting President F. W. de Klerk. This arsenal partly answers the question of why Botswana police are brutal: not only does the government buy them instruments of torture, it gives them legal authority use those instruments on citizens. In this context, the problem lies way above the office of the BPS Commissioner.
Some former British colonies are now agitating for a fundamental (not cosmetic) reorientation of policing at a political level. This campaign has yet to reach Botswana.
