Multi-ethnic societies pose challenges mono-ethnic societies do not have – the potential for misunderstanding, fundamental disagreement and mutual distrust.
Good marital relations need about seven positive interactions to counter the impact of every negative one. Likewise, the possibility of good race relations depends on many factors, but a single incident of cross ethnic violence can easily derail them.
Historically, incidents of violence are a trigger for inter-communal bloodshed across the world. Not only cases of terrorism but an impulsive murder or a rape here or there frequently spark riots. England is topical case. Generally, England is very tolerant. However, with the wholesale systematic abuses of young girls in Rotherham still in the background, England has experienced several riots following some recent cross-ethnic murders. For example, the Southport murder of three young girls by the son of Rwandan immigrants, and the mere rumour of a gang rape last week.
Lee Kuan Yew admired the ‘well-ordered and disciplined’ society of 1940s London and implemented one in Singapore. The low fear of crime he enabled plays an essential role in the good inter-ethnic relationships of Singapore. Most people otherwise get along if the authorities remove the small number of wrongdoers from each community.
Cross-ethnic crime is surprisingly rare. Murderers and rapists usually prey predominantly on their own.
In the US nearly 90% of the victims of black killers are black. The same pattern holds for all the other racial groups. Logically if ‘black lives matter’ to black people, they would be more concerned about dealing with the black gangsters among them than with white policemen.
Yet we cannot dismiss or disparage the fact that people care a great deal about who is preying upon them. For some reason, no doubt evolutionary, people feel much safer if the predator is not an outsider. A real or imagined incident of cross-ethnic violence will cause outsized feelings and responses. Crime is costly to social tranquillity, undermines political legitimacy and slows economic growth appreciably.
Rare
Not only inter-ethnic crime, but all serious crime is rare. Fewer than 1 in 400 of any demographic commit serious crimes, violent or otherwise. Only 6% of those in turn are responsible for half of the crimes. That tells us that we could solve or prevent half of all serious crime by targeting fewer than 1 in 6,000 people (a mere handful) of individuals in every community.
In South Africa that would be fewer than 8,000 people, or only 5% of the current prison population. Furthermore, these individuals are usually and easily identifiable by, or well known to, the police and their communities. The failure to curb these individuals effectively is largely a matter of political will.
So how come these dangerous individuals are still at large? Ideology and the culture of human rights, plus police incompetence or corruption, play outsized roles.
In my view the police should focus on their primary function, which is the effective prevention or prosecution of crime. Ideology, by which I mean ‘sticking to a pre-ordained worldview even when the results show it is not working’ should not be one of the functions of the police at all. Crime prevention is downstream of a system of human rights which have become sacrosanct, but that should not be. When the system does not work it creates huge injustices against victims and builds an air of fear about strangers in our midst.
Human rights are not self-evident. To most they are not God-given, and I agree with Bentham that natural rights are “nonsense on stilts”. Rights are things the state and community decide to grant. They depend on an impartial law and a state which enjoys legitimacy, as well as reciprocal ideas of obligation and loyalty.
The human rights of some inevitably clash with the human rights of others. The police should acknowledge and respect human rights apart from safety but when rights conflict we need to consider the trade-offs. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, safety is primary, and therefore I think we should give it more weight than, say, dignity.
Shortchanged
Whose rights should be shortchanged in order to guarantee safety? Those who are a lot more prone to committing serious crimes than others. Those suffering from psychosis, members of criminal gangs and other individuals with a history of serious crime. Psychotic people are responsible for many of the murders that have gone viral lately.
Often ‘responsible’ authorities have either not detained them, or have released them, in spite of a long history of concerning events. There are those who are not psychotic, but who nevertheless have an extensive rap sheet of serious crimes. Belonging to a gang or enterprise for whom serious crime is a modus operandi should also be grounds for losing rights.
California and El Salvador have made gang membership a serious crime and try to lock up the entire gang. The effect on crime is extraordinarily large in places where gangs are a big factor. A 98% drop in El Salvador and 5-64% short-term decreases in California. The effect of putting away whole gangs in the Cape Flats would be just as impressive. Locking up persistently violent individuals, psychotic or otherwise, until they are obviously incapable of harm will be similarly effective.
Part of the human rights concerns about El Salvador gangsters involves the harshness of treatment. Similarly, with many of the insane. I agree that their treatment is often too extreme and unnecessary, but it is nonetheless essential to remove them from society until they cannot be a threat.
The South African police force, from police ministers to traffic cops, is so corrupt that we could well regard it as a criminal gang. I am not suggesting we jail the entire police force, but radical reform is obviously necessary. Perhaps we should disband the police and start a new force/service from scratch. Part of any reform must be quality control. The police force is not cognitively or morally selective.
Brighter than the criminal
Police solve something like less than 1 in 3 murders in SA. That is important because apprehension is more of a deterrent than a severe punishment, and the probability of apprehension depends a lot on whether the detective is brighter than the criminal.
In short, I believe race relations, economic welfare and just the general national mood would be a lot better if we stopped serious crime. I think that is worth both the sacrifice of some of the rights of 1 in 8,000 people, and depriving corrupt and incompetent police of employment.
[Image: https://www.pexels.com/photo/forensics-investigator-in-protective-suit-at-the-crime-scene-10481247/]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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