Policing and Human Rights

When the Street Disappears: Eminent Domain, Redevelopment, and the Dissociative State

“…In her ethnography on policing, Hornberger () notes the bureaucratic dehumanization of individual persons by police, represented in the detachment of docket culture, that is, the “brown paper files … contain[ing] all the information in a case.” The block and lot terminology in the EIS document, however, not only dehumanized residents but also effectively erased them, returning the state to an explicit position of sovereignty. Such language—which Goldstein sarcastically told us was “very personal and fair!”—underpinned the idea that this land ultimately belonged to the state: it was there before the present owners and it would be there, as blocks and lots, long after them.…”

“…Rather than openly communicating its intention to seize property, de‐map streets, and move people, the state instead relied on (1) the ambiguity of its partnership with the developer, (2) the narrative framings of the project and of the public by the media, and (3) the efforts of project opponents to articulate the threat of eminent domain. In this dissociative context, the state successfully implemented eminent domain in the absence of what Lipsky () called street‐level bureaucrats, often shown to be the front‐line government employees who carry out and enforce laws and policy (Hornberger ; Matarese ; Trinch and Berk‐Seligson .) We draw on cultural anthropology and discourse analysis to reconstruct how, during this detached state of “the state,” information disseminated about the project at first rendered those living and working in the area invisible, and then created a public story of individual choices made as private business transactions, rather than one in which people were pressured to give up their land to a developer.…”

WAITING FOR FARLAM: Marikana, social inequality and the relative autonomy of the police

“…34 Sam's girlfriend's contacts are black, while Peggy's police are white. Peggy's police are also led by a detective who is affronted by Sam's lack of respect for her and keen to gain the kudos to be had from finding an illegal weapon after recently transferring from a unit dealing with more serious crime.…”

“…31 In the case discussed by Hornberger, its origins lie in Peggy's concern to reclaim her space in the apartment from Samsomething she was unable to do using the civil law. The criminal process is initiated 'to mobilise the police to intervene in a case in which they would otherwise refuse to do so' .…”

“…The criminal process is initiated 'to mobilise the police to intervene in a case in which they would otherwise refuse to do so' . 32 For those living on the margins in a world where rules are 'flexible, imprecise and contested' , and where 'the formal dichotomies of criminal and lawful, private and public are blurred and no longer hold' , calling the police is one way of advancing individual claims to space or property. 33 Thus, Hornberger suggests, the the state and a ruling elite were ever broken, even as that elite metamorphosed to accommodate the likes of Ramaphosa and the government ministers who may (or may not) have had a hand in directing the brutal suppression of the Marikana protests.…”