Durban has, like every other South African city, an amazing amount of residential security, but it doesn’t have either the fortress feeling or looming menace of Johannesburg, a city that I honestly fear. Still, for all the efforts to reform policing since 1993, there is still none of the sense of police presence here that would be a basic expectation in most European or American cities. Nor, honestly, could one expect that to happen quickly or possibly ever in South Africa, given the scale of the issues that appeared after 1993 and the extent to which the police forces needed a total institutional overhaul.
It is always a reminder to me not only of the ways in which I take police for granted–and also how much we also take for granted the everyday disinclination of people not to engage in theft or violence even when they are in desperate circumstances or dire poverty. Listening to two stories from my hosts illustrated some of the strength underneath community life here.
One was about how neighborhoods banded together to buy security services in a way that reinforced rather than dissipated community–working with unions to create a networked security force that was stable and well-treated, working to create a progressive structure for fees so that homeowners paid in at variable rates depending on their incomes and property values, trying to make the security a part of the neighborhoods rather than faceless strangers posted at the outer walls of a remorseless fortress. As far as I can see right around where I’m staying, it’s worked pretty well. I don’t think I’d go for a stroll at 11pm down some of the smaller streets, mind you, but otherwise there’s a human, open feeling to things. The effort to get that more humane, community-friendly system into place sounds as if it was a pretty difficult project for all involved, though.
The other story that my friends told me concerned some vicious dogs that got loose from a house in the neighborhood and attacked one of them and their own dog while they were on a walk. There were a lot of interesting aspects to the story, but the relevant part in this context is that basically the entire local community came to their aid: some local students coming out of a field hockey game beat on the attacking dogs with their hockey sticks without thought for their own safety, people helped to transport my friends’ injured dog to a nearby vet, the domestic workers in the neighborhood worriedly checked in on the dog and my friend to find out the status of their injuries, a man ran eight blocks to find my friend’s husband, and some construction workers used some concrete barriers they had available to pen up the attacking dogs again as the owners weren’t around. Much of this might happen in close-knit urban neighborhoods in the US as well, of course, but we’d also expect the police to be part of the story eventually, to sort out the problem, take the dogs into custody, create an official record of the events that might or might not become relevant to later legal proceedings. Here, it’s just the community. It’s a really encouraging story in that context, the spontaneous collaboration of so many people for the common good, a kind of anti-Kitty Genovese narrative. The hard thing is to figure out first what makes that kind of spontaneous social network reliably appear, what the preconditions of its possibility are, and then to figure out what to do in places where it’s not happening. That in the end is why I look to policing and feel vaguely uncomfortable in its absence: it feels to me like the guarantee of some kind of last-instance infrastructure of order and coherence when everyday sociality can’t be counted on to supply it.