Today we report on at least two incidents of mob justice in Daveyton, Gauteng, where three men accused of crime were beaten up, two of whom were killed, by community members last week.
Last Monday, two men were stoned to death after they were caught allegedly breaking into shacks in the Qalabusha informal settlement.
On Thursday, a 24-year-old was beaten with electrical cables, iron rods, stoned and left with severe head injuries after he was allegedly found stealing home appliances in one of the shacks in the area.
This is the same area where 27-year-old Rethabile Choshane was necklaced in a vigilante attack in a case of mistaken identity in May 2019.
Such incidents are a common occurrence in SA at large.
In fact, in the 2017/18 financial year police crime statistics showed that of the 20,336 murders committed that year, 846 of them were incidents of mob justice.
By the 2019/2020 financial year, over 3,800 mob justice incidents had been reported and at least 1,202 people killed.
The most obvious story told by these statistics is that ours is a violent nation.
However, while we must condemn these attacks as blatantly criminal and unacceptable in a constitutional democracy, it is simply not enough to state the obvious.
We must go further to examine the cause of the savagery we see. The biggest cause perhaps is the erosion of trust between the police and communities they serve.
The 2018 Afrobarometer Survey revealed that at least 66% of people mostly don’t trust the police while 46% don’t trust the courts.
In many instances, the breakdown of trust stems from the poor service people often receive at police stations where police are either not responsive to complaints or when they do, their handling of the complaints is inadequate.
While in some instances this poor response is due to incompetence, corruption or dereliction of duty, it is also largely due to policing incapacity where police stations are so under-resourced that they can barely function.
This is why we need a comprehensive and targeted intervention in such communities.
Such intervention must address at least three things – the systemic social challenges that drive criminal behaviour, it must help to capacitate our policing system to respond better to the demands on them and it must educate the community on how the criminal justice system, including our courts, function.
All these cannot be done without the leadership from the government, police and community structures at large.
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