by Iain Overton
Of course, police forces carry guns, and lots of them. Of the nearly 1 billion firearms worldwide, law enforcement organisations have about 25 million – about 1.3 firearms per officer. And the bigger the force, the more guns there are. China’s police have an estimated 1.95 million; though its sheer size means – at about seven firearms for every ten officers – they have fewer per officer than the global average. India’s police have fewer guns in total – 1.9 million – but more per officer – around three for every two policemen.1 But neither country boasts the most guns per officer: that prize goes to Serbia with two per officer.
Such figures, of course, only take averages into account. In the US there are about one and a half firearms for every law enforcement officer. But the average officer in the Federal Fish and Wildlife Agency has almost six weapons.2
What interested me were those police worlds where the gun was very present and where that presence transformed policing in a profound way. So I looked at three areas where firearms were at the forefront of law enforcement: police gun units; their use in paramilitary-style raids; and the use of the gun in the police abuse of power.
The dog was visibly excited. It knew something was up. His handler threw sand in the air to see the way the wind was blowing and then unclipped the collar. The brown-flecked Border Collie was off the leash and it scurried from tyre to tyre, laid in a neat row behind the school. At the third one it swivelled on its hind legs and sat down. The handler walked over and, patting his dog, reached into the darkness of the rim; with forefinger and thumb he lifted out a Glock pistol. The dog started to bark.
South African sniffer dogs are trained for two purposes: to find drugs or explosives. The former are experts at sniffing out cocaine and marijuana. The latter are like the dog that was performing before me – able to smell the remnants of an explosive blast, detecting cordite and primer. Gun dogs in a unique sense.
In South Africa such dogs are in constant use. In the south-west the Cape gangs have an estimated 51,000 guns. And this is just the southern tip of the country. Nationally there are as many as 4 million illegal guns; in some areas I was told, with the right contacts, a gun is easier to get hold of than a glass of clean water.3
The effects of this profusion of illegal weapons is clear: at one stage 15,000 South Africans were dying from gunshots a year.4 Police and their gun dogs here, frankly, have their work cut out.
This is why, having met the doctors whose jobs it was to patch up the wounded, I had arranged to meet a police squad dedicated, literally, to sniffing out guns in one of the most violent parts of the world. The dogs here, though, were not being used to search the gang borderlands of Cape Town. Rather, we were at a school. Drugs had been reported being used openly in Hoërskool Bonteheuwel, a small college fixed in one of the poorest neighbourhoods of the Cape Flats. A gun had also been seen, so the armed police had arrived during a morning congregation, announced a raid and told the pupils they were to be searched.
The gun sighting was no surprise. Children as young as fourteen were being arrested in the Cape Flats on gang-related murder charges. Violence had spiked; in 2013, 12 per cent of the 2,580 murders in the province were gang-related, a sharp rise on the previous year.5 The cops were taking no chances. Each child was ordered to put their hands on their heads and, row after row, these young coloured kids were frisked.6 The children rose silently, one by one, to have a policeman’s hands search their skin-and-bone bodies. Large white men went over trouser turn-ups and polo-shirt collars, hunting for drug wraps, flick knives, guns. Some of these kids had said goodbye to childhood a long time ago.
The police worked quickly under a faded wall painted with the words: ‘If you do good, no one remembers. But if you do bad, everyone remembers.’ But school proverbs only do so much; it was the influence of fathers and uncles that the police really had to deal with. In the 1980s, during apartheid, there had been a major relocation of coloured and black people from Cape Town’s inner city out here to the Cape Flats and its surrounding townships. The move had spawned a violence that now spanned the decades and ultimately had given birth to a breed of gangland criminal here that had nothing to lose.
In the quiet of that morning, I could see through the windows an obese woman waddling past, her bulk generously covered in striped fabric. She was pushing a broken pram and looked down at the littered floor, not caring what was unfolding across the road. This was not the first time armed police had been at this troubled school.
Inside, an expressionless officer pulled aside a boy. The youth had tucked his trousers into his socks: a gang sign. The inspector held the child’s shoulder as the dogs scurried around his feet, noses alert. They sniffed at the boy’s legs and turned back to the chairs. No drugs or cordite here, and apartheid’s ghosts stood watching from the shadows.
I walked outside and went over to a gaggle of five Cape Town Metropolitan police. They were idling, their Glock pistols untouched in blue plastic holsters. Each had been in the force for twelve, thirteen years, but, despite the violence of the Flats, none of them had ever fired these pistols at anyone. It was turning into one of those police embeds.
Perhaps sensing the disappointment in my eyes, an inspector put me on patrol of the Cape Flats instead. I rode with Nico Matthee, a forty-seven-year-old white policeman, and Randall Pieters, a thirty-six-year-old coloured cop. Members of the gun dog squad, they had been tasked with searching the tougher areas of the Cape Flats. They wore the khaki trousers and blue shirts of the Metro police, their badges the colours of South Africa: yellow, orange, white, blue, green and black. Hope in a rainbow. Nico, his large stomach hanging over his trousers, a thick moustache seen on many a man in uniform, was engaged and kindly. Randall, with his silver, tightly cut hair, a face pockmarked with acne scars, at first barely said a word.
I squeezed into the rear seat of their car, two dogs in cages in the back and the rest packed with bulletproof vests, handcuffs, shotguns and first-aid kits. The patrolmen both carried Vektor Z88 9mm pistols, a variation of the Italian Beretta. They needed them for this patrol: we were off to the most violent spread of public housing in this landscape of poverty – Manenberg.
Driving in the streets, I noticed that whites drove most of the cars here; the vans were filled with black South Africans. But then we were in an area where there were no white drivers at all and instead only lonely, litter-blown areas of degradation and poverty. It was a landscape of dirty patches of grass, flapping tarpaulins and endless corrugated roofs spreading on either side. Men in tired blue overalls and woollen caps sat by their doorways, and our police car drove slowly past in the morning sun.
‘You get about five to nine living in each shack,’ said Nico, nodding to the side. These were the breeding grounds for violence. A place where, he said, bad people all too often were seen being publicly rewarded for living a life of crime.
‘They call it affirmative shopping,’ said Randall, referring to the theft of property from affluent whites by black and coloured youths. This was home to members of some of the biggest gangs in the Cape, including the Hard Livings, the Clever Kids and the Numbers. There were dozens of smaller hybrid gangs out there, too. In the early 1990s it was thought at least 130 gangs lived in this part of town, with about 100,000 members.7 God knows what the number was today, but the police said it was worse now than then.
‘They deal in Tik,’ said Nico, referring to the locally produced crystal meth, ‘or mandrax, marijuana, heroin. But the crystal meth here is the biggest seller. And all the shootings around here are gang-related: it’s about competing drug territories. They’re armed up – Tauruses, CZ 75s, Glocks. It’s mainly 9mm handguns.’
Manenberg, with its 70,000 residents, had fourteen homicides and fifty-six attempted murders in the summer of 2013 alone. This year it was even worse: thirty killings in the first four months. The locals said the police were failing in their job.8 It even prompted the Western Cape premier to call for the army to be deployed. In the first nine months of 20
13 there had been over 1,200 arrests. But the area was far from settled. Randall told me to wind down the windows so I could hear the gunshots, and we entered the roughest public-housing district of the roughest area of Cape Town.
The walls were covered with scrawled gang graffiti: turf marked out like wild cats pissing on trees. The Hard Livings controlled this area – the tag ‘HL$’ everywhere. The remaining areas were divided between the smaller gangs: the Young Dixie Boys, the Naughty Boys, the Junky Funky Kids – unsaid boundaries on every street. Almost 90 per cent of people living here felt there were parts of Manenberg they could never go.9
Nico was talking. ‘The coloureds here have no discipline. I’m not a racist but since ’94 things have changed, but not for them. The whites used to be in charge. Now it’s the blacks in charge. The coloureds are stuck in the middle. Sometimes they want to act like whites, sometimes like blacks. This is the problem.’
The Numbers gang, the 27, 28 and 29, were the worst, he said. A four-year-old had been raped and burned by some of them. Then he described how Numbers members were thought to be behind the recent shooting of two cops near Manenberg.10 A tattooed youth had fired into the prostrate officers as they lay in the dust, shooting one of them through the head. He had taken the firearm from the other. This was a high accolade for gang members here: to become a cop killer. Better still if he got a gun.11 I looked out of the window and wondered if the police made me more of a target.
Our police car slowly turned and shifted gear, and we were deep into the heart of the district. This dirty grass and stone and concrete land was a scar on the conscience of South Africa. Unemployment in Manenberg was as high as 66 per cent – poverty clung to the houses like mould.
There was a click. Randall slotted a round into his shotgun.
The roads were layered with rubbish, kids playing listlessly. The homes here looked the same as prison compounds or military barracks – straight lines of municipal bare concrete infused with hopelessness. The only colour was the graffiti. Boys stood at a faded corner and stared at us, sullen-eyed.
‘The gangs use these young children to hide the guns – they are the runners,’ said Nico. ‘And the watchers.’ Everyone knew everyone here; strangers were noted. Of the 200 people killed in gang violence in Cape Town in the last year, over two-thirds knew their killer.
We passed a group of plain-clothes police carrying bushels of dagga plants, the local name for marijuana, from a house, their faces brushing up against the heady green leaves. Another car pulled up beside us. A bad-tempered policeman in the front ignored the tear-stained woman in the back; she was begging for forgiveness, her voice rising with each cry. She’s being taken in for a drugs violation, he told us, but she wasn’t the person the police were wanting to arrest that day.
A dozen warrants had been issued for known gang members in these streets, and there were two more to be picked up. That was why we were here. One of those was wanted in connection with three firearms linked to a specific murder. Then a call came over the radio: the suspect had been seen. He was wearing a white T-shirt, and the crackling voice said he had a gun on him. Nick’s foot pulsed on the accelerator.
He drove a hard left, then right, and we hit the pavement and spilled out, chasing breathlessly down a side road into a labyrinth of unnamed streets. Two other armed police were ahead of me, arms outstretched, pistols out, safety catches off. They called out and pushed towards the copper-brown shacks. An old coloured woman, hair in curlers, appeared above, wide-eyed. Perhaps she was right to be scared. Shootings here were harried, spray-in-the-air acts of madness. In the past the old gang violence was more ritualised – gangs battled at an appointed time at night in open fields beyond the residential perimeter, to prevent injury to innocent residents. Today it was more close your eyes and fire blindly – particularly if you were trapped by some fast-approaching police.
I expected a sudden burst of gunfire, but none came. The runner had disappeared. We went through the ramshackle lanes with their pools of hidden shadows and out onto the next sun-blinded street, and there was nobody there except one man wearing a red-stained T-shirt. He was bleeding heavily, because someone had struck him full in the mouth. His neck and chest were covered in tattoos, markings of the gang number 28. He walked past the police and did not stop. His bleeding was his concern, not theirs.
The police were never going to be seen as friends in this area. Over 40 per cent of the people here thought they took protection money from gangsters. And over 80 per cent said the police would not be able to protect them if they wanted to be a witness in a murder trial.12 So why would a gang member go to them over a split lip?
There was a certain truth in the wounded man’s attitude. Later, researching the South African police, I learned that in every month in this country’s first seven years of democracy there was an average of thirty-six deaths ‘as a result of police action’ – 91 per cent of those being shot.13 The cops here had an image problem.
The gun dogs were out of the cars, barking, but the moment had been lost. The children that rested on each street corner had long ago spread the news that the law was around; those who were sought were gone.
Nico’s hair was matted with sweat, and you couldn’t tell if it was the heat or fear that had done it. The operation was drawing to a close; the sun had reached its zenith, and it would be hours before a criminal with a gun would venture out to reclaim the streets and the night. The gun units would have to return another day, and my press embed was up.
Besides, the dogs were tired.
Police forces in the states of California, New York and Florida had all refused my request to observe a US Special Weapons and Tactics – SWAT – team raid. Many others never returned my call. So the email from Nevada was not a surprise.
‘It is against our policy publicize our tactics [sic.] and our police department does not allow ride-alongs on raids due to privacy issues. We will be unable to accommodate your request,’ wrote Larry Hadfield of the LVMPD from Las Vegas’s Martin Luther King Boulevard.
This was frustrating, because I knew there were about 50,000 SWAT raids in the US every year, and their refusal felt like another slap in the face. So the email later that day from Chris, a police sharpshooter I had been talking to, was a good one. ‘Happy to meet,’ he wrote. Then he added that phrase that makes your heart sink: ‘but it will have to be off record’.
It’s always like this. Soldiers and policemen are inevitably cagey when it comes to speaking to journalists; when they agree to meet they think it’s a Deep Throat exposé. So on the one hand you have saccharine police embeds, on the other you have a culture of silence. It’s no wonder the police often get away with so much. But Chris was my small entry into what had become a massive issue in the US: the ongoing militarisation of their boys in blue. So we met.
He was one of four sharpshooters in a twenty-one-member SWAT team in a mid-size midwest town and had been in that job for about six years. He had a good lifestyle, earning just over $70,000 in a county where the average salary was $47,000. And because he had to do regular fitness tests – a timed 1.5-mile run, sit-ups, push-ups, bench presses – he was fit. The polo shirt he was wearing was tight-fitting, and his arms filled the sleeves. But his eyes were dull, and it did not take me long to realise that this man was going to give very little away.
‘We shoot every other week for about four hours each session, up to 1,000 yards down range,’ he said. ‘We train to put down a target with a single shot. We aim for either a headshot or the chest area.’ In the situations he would find himself in, you don’t try to wound. One survey of American police sharpshooters found that 80 per cent of all recorded incidents were fatal – about half hit the head.14 It takes a certain skill to be able to do that.
‘So what sets you apart from other officers?’ I asked.
‘The single difference between me and my SWAT team members is patience,’ he said. It means he often has to spend hours doing surveillance. ‘Most of the SWAT guys
want to get in and do something – “go, go go” – but my role is more monitoring, watching, calling in about tactical concerns, blocking the path of entry and exit of the criminal.’
He looked a little disconsolate. ‘I guess it is not as fun, not as exciting and adrenaline crazy.’
I asked him if he had any regrets, and he said he had used his rifle only the once to lethal effect.
‘The guy had beaten up his wife and had a history of mental problems.’
He didn’t want to elaborate, but five team members had fired at the same time.
‘It makes you think though . . .’ he said, with the trace of a southern twang, ‘was the guy mentally ill? Could he have been talked out of it before he came out with a gun?’ But he had never lost sleep over it and he loved his job.
‘I stop the bad guys from getting to hurt the good guys,’ he said. It was a simple and uncomplicated way of viewing things.
Yet I was disturbed by what he had told me about that mentally ill man, and the more I read about the world of the police sniper, the more disturbed I became. There were stories of sixteen-year-olds, distraught at bad exam marks, threatening to take their own lives with the family shotgun, then being killed by over-zealous police sharpshooters.15 Tales of police snipers in camouflage suits being sent into the home of paranoid men in crisis, schizophrenics threatening to cut their wrists.16
It struck me this was a world where the gun could easily cause situations to escalate: the inevitable police armed response in the US transforming events into things far worse. And the more I dug, the more I realised how bad the situation had become.
In May 2010 a team of six armed police in Nassau County in the state of New York was granted a warrant for a no-knock entry to a home. They were after someone in that Long Island house who, their informant had told them, was selling drugs. Their intelligence, however, didn’t say that the address they were raiding was two apartments, not one. So when the policemen battered down the door of the downstairs flat and charged in with rifles, voices puncturing the dawn silence, they were faced with an impassable staircase.