Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (17 page)

Yet a fundamental shift had happened. Once these killers used to have bows and arrows, but today they have shotguns and high-powered rifles. The introduction of guns into this tribal culture changed everything. Before, the traditional weapons of clubs and arrows killed few, but their new weapons massively increased the numbers killed. One report even said the spread of semi-automatics was ‘out of control’. And the Southern Highlands, where we were now, was considered the worst place of all.
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I guess we were lucky not to have been executed. But now, in the sanctuary of the village, there was not much else for us to do but wait. So, a tattered and much-used leather ball was brought out, and we played a terrible game of basketball and, sipping a warm bottle of Coca-Cola that the local village store sold, we sat under a reddening sun.

The roar of an off-road vehicle disturbed the quiet. The track leading up to the circle of mud and thatch huts was deeply scarred by the mountain rains – ravines in the road. But the vehicles here were as rugged as the barefoot tribes, and the police car pounded up it with ease, braking in a squeal of metal in the middle of our game.

A huge man, his shirt straining at his barrel chest, got out of the
car. A Papuan policeman, he was the largest person I had seen up there. He had a thick moustache and wore mirrored aviator glasses, like a 1980s New York cop. He was chewing betel nut, the seed of the areca palm, and his mouth was a red smear. It gave him, along with his heavy black combat boots and the oiled pistol on his hip, a dangerous air.

He listened to what had happened and climbed onto the bonnet of his vehicle. His voice was forceful and deep. ‘If these white men don’t get their bags back in the next twelve hours,’ he said in the local dialect, ‘I will burn down all the villages in this valley. Each and every building.’

And that was it: Papuan law enforcement. We were horrified: our uncalled-for presence here had resulted in the threat of a mass burning of villages. We tried to protest, but he ignored our pleas. This was the Highlands, and this was how they did things: a form of retributive justice.

His threat worked. Twelve hours passed, and our bags turned up, slipped back to us under the cover of night. A neat cut of our money had been sliced off the top, but we were told not to bother about that. The case was settled.

Looking back on it, perhaps I now see how so much about guns and crime and policing lay in that small episode. The terror of the robbery and the small humiliations that come when you are faced with intimate lethal force. The breakdown of the rule of law in remote and impoverished armed communities. The state’s exercise of power through a stronger, better-armed force and the casual dispensing of justice.

It was an incident that helped frame my thinking, too, when I was to shift my research away from the illegal use of guns by killers and criminals to looking at those who use their guns in the name of the state: the police.

7. THE POLICE

The trouble with police embeds – the gun-sniffing dogs of South Africa – chasing gangsters in Cape Town’s slums – talking to an American police sharpshooter – understanding their warrior cops – the Philippines recalled – when the police murder – the death of an activist in Mindanao and beyond

One of the challenges as a journalist, as a writer, is meeting the police.

Generally, when you embed with the army in a conflict zone you are sent in to see some ‘action’. Politicians and military press officers want to show the world that their troops are at the hot end of things, guns at the ready, doing the job they were sent in to do. Journalists have made careers from these high-octane embeds, risking their lives in bloody campaigns, often acting as the liberal conscience of a nation at war.

Hitching a ride with the police, though, is different. Rarely do you get on a hard-ended raid. I have been on embeds with cops in some of the most criminally active parts of the world: El Salvador, Honduras, Colombia, Brazil. And each experience, oddly, felt the same.

It begins with a tense shaking of hands, because policemen distrust anyone who is not one of them. There is the donning of a bulletproof vest; the faint promise that something might happen. Then, after a briefing, there is a drive and the inevitable crackled call to a crime scene, sirens flashing. The destination, though, is
reached as another police unit has apprehended the criminal, or a body is already lying in the street, or it was a false alarm.

The basic truth is that policing is deeply political, and no police media officer wants a journalist seeing anyone getting shot by their boys in blue. So they send you to places that once were terrible but have since been tamed. They get you on community policing initiatives. It’s all heart and minds, not blood and gore. And it’s not just the censorship of a press officer that’s at work here. The reality is this: most police don’t really use guns that much.

With the people I had looked at so far – mass killers and criminals – guns were central to their actions. But I have found, over time, that police forces often have a much more complex relationship with guns. Some forces are very weapons-focused; some concentrate on intelligence-led policing; others use different forms of restraint, like Tasers. A policeman’s gun, when used appropriately, is not used in attack, but rather in defence – upholding the law, not imposing something.

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.
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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.
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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.
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The effects of this profusion of illegal weapons is clear: at one stage 15,000 South Africans were dying from gunshots a year.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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God knows what the number was today, but the police said it was worse now than then.