World's Toughest Cops: On the Front Line of the War against Crime. Vinnie Jones
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a shaved head like a bullet and the forearms of a wrestler, and he’s made even more bulky and imposing by the body armour he wears the whole time we’re with him. During the day his eyes are hidden behind wraparound shades – at night, you can see they’re steely blue, unwavering, steady. And he’s under no illusions as to the dangers of his job.
‘In the Flying Squad you can get any incident,’ he told us. ‘Policemen get shot, hijackings, armed robberies, house robberies, shooting incidents…you name it, day to day. When a policeman goes to work you never know what to expect. You never know what’s over the hill. Can be armed robbery, can be a house break-in, you can get shot down. When you say goodbye to your loved ones at night, you never know if it’s the last time.
‘Because so many policemen get killed in South Africa, you live day by day. You just have to enjoy the job you do.’
He wasn’t exaggerating, either.
South Africa may be known now as the Rainbow Nation, a country freshly emerged from its troubled and bloody history – but it still bears the scars of its past. For 43 years it was a state divided by the rules of apartheid: where the black population were stripped of their citizenship and denied their basic human rights.
With it came oppression and violence. As civil rights leaders like Nelson Mandela and Stephen Biko were imprisoned or murdered, the population divided along ethnic and economic lines. Massive townships sprang up on the edge of the cities, becoming homes to millions of blacks and Indians who’d been forced out of ‘whites only’ areas. Without investment, facilities and often even basics like running water, they were in stark contrast to the luxurious homes of the white minority rulers.
Resistance grew, however…until, finally, Nelson Mandela’s long walk to freedom in 1991 saw him released from jail and apartheid was abolished. Black and white, rich and poor: everyone was equal now. The shattered country could set about rebuilding itself.
That was the idea, anyway. But if all men were now equal in the eyes of the law, the chasms which divided society for so long have proved less easy to repair. This is still a country of terrible economic inequality, and with the old barriers torn down, crime has rocketed.
The end of apartheid was a new dawn for South Africa, but with it came a terrible hangover and a whole new reputation to live down. A new horror fills the lives of citizens – black and white alike: gun violence.
Each day, more than 300 murders and violent attacks take place here; this country holds the dubious distinction of being the number one nation in the world for assaults, rapes and murders with firearms. In South Africa, there are 50 murders a day and every three days a cop is killed.
South Africa has a population of around 47 million people – that’s six million less than the combined total of England and Wales. Yet in the same year that those two countries witnessed 757 murders, South Africa saw 18,487.
Every year in this place over 100 police officers are killed in the line of duty – roughly two every week. In the UK there have been less than 100 officers killed in the last 50 years.
It’s what makes being a cop here one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. And for Andre Steyn, it’s especially so. As an officer in the Flying Squad, he’s part of a rapid-response unit dealing with the worst the country has to offer – often acting on instinct, relying on a heady cocktail of training and adrenaline to get him through each shift.
‘For every policeman it’s a dangerous job, but ours is just different because we respond to situations as they happen,’ he explained. ‘Any emergency that comes through, we respond. So we’re the first vehicles standing off. You have to be ready for everything; you never know what can happen. It can spark and then you have to be ready for it.’
We were rolling with Steyn on an ordinary night in the streets of South Africa’s third city. This was to climax, it seemed, with the take-down of doormen wielding machine-guns outside a city-centre nightclub, but the hours before weren’t exactly short of incident either. And Steyn himself, we would find out, was no ordinary cop.
The speed at which South Africa has transformed itself is staggering. From global outcasts, the West’s dirty little secret…to shiny, progressive tourist hotspot and World Cup hosts: and all in less than 20 years. It’s change at a breathtaking pace, a roller-coaster ride of reform and renovation.
Some might say it’s happening too fast. Some parts of society just can’t keep up.
And that speed, that urgency, seems to seep through everything here. To outsiders, visitors like us, the effect can be dizzying. Our night with Andre Steyn fitted the same pattern: it was breathless, non-stop, a race against time. There wasn’t a moment to take stock, there wasn’t a second to spare. We sped from one incident to another, covering everything from drink-drivers to dead bodies – and all at a tension level we didn’t experience anywhere else.
Sure, we had scary moments in every place we visited: but in Durban, speeding through the streets with the Flying Squad, chasing the worst this place had to offer, we couldn’t relax for a moment. There just wasn’t time to think.
Andre Steyn isn’t afraid, however.
‘It was my passion to become a policeman,’ he told us. ‘I grew up in a military family. I shot my first gun when I was five or six years old. That’s how I grew up. It’s in me.’
Steyn spent some time in the army in 1991 – the year after Nelson Mandela was freed – and in 1993 enrolled at the Police Academy in Chatsworth, a township originally created for the Indian population of Durban. ‘I was in the first white intake there – and it was like a holiday camp because we were fit from the army,’ he laughs. ‘But, yeah, they teach you the basic police work there: armed SWAT, armed driving, tactical training, computer stuff – you name it, you do it.
‘When I finally became a cop on the streets I was very excited,’ he continued. ‘Yeah, bro – you get your badge, you can’t wait to get your gun, your pistol…I just wanted to get to the job, you know? Work, work, work.’
Work, work, work. Our night with Andre Steyn was work, all right. Hard work, fast work, dangerous work. And, at least it seemed to us, work without a strategy. Maybe that was going on back at HQ, in the corridors of power – but if so, we didn’t see it. Where we were there just wasn’t time. Steyn and his partner were too busy out on the streets, dealing with it all.
Steyn had got word of the meeting in the car park whilst on patrol. The informant had come forward that evening; the Flying Squad would strike that night. It’s the way things work here.
When the call came through we had already been out with Steyn and his partner John Chapman for hours – and we’d seen enough action to fill a whole series of programmes.
Steyn’s a pretty daunting-looking guy at the best of times: it just so happened that that particular night he was especially fired up. We watched him sign out, load up and double-check his weapons in silence, then followed as he led us into the patrol car. The last of the evening sun had turned all of Durban gold, sparkling off the high-rises and shopping centres, and as we slid smoothly along the highways it was easy to forget that we were in one of the most dangerous cities in the world.
He was about to remind us just how dangerous. The night before, an ex-girlfriend of his had been the victim of a carjacking.
Carjacking is one of Durban’s most common crimes – and one of its nastiest. Victims are jumped getting in or out of their vehicles, sometimes even when they’re simply waiting at traffic lights, and forced to drive to one of the townships at gunpoint. Once there, the lucky ones will be robbed and left to find their own way home. All too often, however, the victims are raped, assaulted, even murdered. Most carjackers in Durban are armed with cheap, illegal weapons, including pistols, 9mm semi-automatic machine-guns, even AK47s.
In the Kwazulu Natal district, of which Durban is the capital, carjacking has grown by 40 per cent, and now more than 70 cars are hijacked every single week.
With his eyes unreadable behind the wraparound shades, Steyn filled us in with