In the present, gripping reality of six women being found murdered within close proximity, part of what we need to confront is how and why the number was allowed to exceed one, then two, before the urgency of the situation became undeniable.
We need to confront the hierarchy of urgency where public visibility appears to determine how seriously the killings are treated. South Africa is not new to multiple killings, particularly the killing of women.
Whether we are dealing with a serial killer or entirely different motives behind the murders, the focus on prevention should not be limited to policing capacity. The more uncomfortable question is institutional: what determines the urgency with which law enforcement responds to a particular pattern of violence?
Urgency is not simply about having enough police officers, vehicles or investigative resources.
It is also about what an institution perceives as sufficiently alarming to demand an immediate and heightened response, and about what makes law enforcement move from responding to individual incidents to recognising a collective threat.
This is where geography and the demographic and socioeconomic character of the communities in which policing occurs become impossible to ignore.
South Africa has a long history in which race, class and geography have influenced whose safety is treated as urgent by the state and law enforcement at the first level of response.
This does not necessarily require an individual police officer to consciously decide one victim matters more than another. Institutional inequality can manifest in something more subtle and arguably more difficult to confront: different communities can have different thresholds for attracting urgency.
The location of a crime can influence how it is perceived. So can the demographic and socioeconomic character of the community in which it occurs. A murder occurring in an area accustomed to high levels of violence can be absorbed into the statistical and institutional background of crime.
A murder in a community perceived as safer, wealthier or more socially influential can immediately appear extraordinary precisely because it violates what that environment is expected to be. That distinction matters when six women are found murdered within close geographical proximity.
The question is not whether these women deserved more resources than other murder victims. The question is whether their circumstances warranted a level of urgency that should have been apparent before the number reached six. If the first woman is treated as an individual murder, perhaps that is understandable.
If the second is treated separately, perhaps investigators still have legitimate reasons for doing so. But once many women are found murdered within the same geographical area, the institutional response should begin to change. The threshold for asking whether the cases are connected should become considerably lower.
Instead, what is particularly troubling about the present situation is the apparent relationship between visibility and urgency.
If the fourth case received heightened attention only after members of a running community took the matter to social media, and the discovery of a fifth body and a sixth occurs against the backdrop of that heightened public attention, we have to ask what caused the institutional response to intensify.
Would the same number of women have had to be murdered before the situation was treated as an extraordinary threat if the killings had occurred in a different geographical environment?
Was it the killings themselves?
Or was it the fact that people had finally started paying attention to them?
That distinction is fundamental to the progression of the current and future development of holding law enforcement accountable.
Because if public visibility is what accelerates institutional urgency, then the women who receive little public attention are potentially left dependent on whether somebody outside law enforcement has enough visibility, influence or determination to make their deaths impossible to overlook.
That takes us directly back to geography and the demographic and socioeconomic character of the communities in which policing occurs. Would the same number of women have had to be murdered before the situation was treated as an extraordinary threat if the killings had occurred in a different geographical environment?
Would the institutional threshold for urgency have been the same in a community with a different racial or socioeconomic character? These are uncomfortable questions, but discomfort is not a sufficient reason to avoid them.
It would be too easy to reduce this to the claim that individual police officers simply do not care about black women. That is too easy, and it allows the institutional question to disappear into an accusation about individual prejudice.
The more important question is whether the structures through which urgency is produced operate differently depending on the communities in which violence occurs, who those communities are understood to represent and where they are situated because there is a difference between being policed and being urgently protected.
A community can have a visible police presence and still experience a lower institutional urgency when its residents become victims, as much as a place can be regarded as a high-crime area, and paradoxically, that very reputation can make another violent death appear less exceptional.
The extraordinary can become ordinary. That is the hierarchy we should be interrogating now and not merely: How many police officers were available?
What made six murdered women urgent when one, two or three should have been enough to demand a closer look?
If public pressure was instrumental in changing that urgency, then we need to ask an even more uncomfortable question: would the institutional response have changed without that pressure?
The answer to that question should not be by speculation, nor should we avoid asking it simply because the answer may be uncomfortable.
The geography of these killings, the demographic and socioeconomic character of the communities in which policing occurs, and the chronology of the response all deserve to be examined together, because if urgency is genuinely equal, then the threshold should be explainable.
We should be able to identify what changed between the earlier cases and the point at which the police response became visibly more urgent.
If that explanation cannot be found, the public is entitled to question whether the urgency of justice is being determined solely by the crime or also by where it happens, the communities in which it happens, and how loudly people have to demand that it be seen.
Kekana is an independent writer focusing on social commentary and spatial inequality in SA
Sowetan
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