Seeing more police would help us not to fear the unseen

One day soon, I hope an anthropologist will look into life at the southern tip of this continent and explain the reasons for the undercurrent of violence that has come to permeate almost everything we do.

That study may show that contrary to walking a long road to freedom, we have stepped into lager where life is edged, to quote Hunter S Thompson, by fear and loathing.

This struck me (an appropriate pun I think) recently when I stopped, last week, on my way home late one afternoon to give two young hitchhikers a lift.

I don’t normally stop to give people lifts after reading so many horror stories of hitchhikers becoming hijackers. This fear was heightened some time ago when I stopped to give a young man standing at the foot of Ou Kaapse Weg a lift. He was going to Ocean View he said. Then he told me, on the most desolate stretch of road through Silvermine, that he was on his way home on parole after serving 10 years of a 15-year sentence for murder.

I was very happy when he asked me to stop at the Long Beach Mall to let him out.

Anyway, that was then and this is now, so last week when I saw a young couple running along the side of the road near UCT, I assumed they were late for an appointment, threw caution to the wind and stopped to help them on their a way. Not long after they had settled into my car the ear-ringed man in the passenger seat told me that they had just escaped from a notorious drug rehab centre in the north.

My hand dropped to the side of my seat, where I keep a wooden axe handle, just in case he decided to jab a knife in my ribs and relieve me of my car. Being hijacked once a lifetime is enough. But once I had listened to their story – over the thumping of my heart driving with one hand while the other held on to the axe handle – it appeared innocent enough. They were out for the weekend, fully intended to return and they turned out to be, well, peaceful. Although I was relieved when we arrived at their destination and I was able to travel on, unharmed.

After surviving two threatening thugs in my back garden, I venture out these days gingerly, eyes like a chameleon, scanning for tikked-out creepy crawlies slithering over the walls – especially after my neighbours woke at 3am a few weeks ago to find two men in their lounge. Now they have a home ring-fenced with barbed wire.

Yes, I am happy that the muggers, who attacked hikers at Silvermine where I go for relaxing walks, were arrested but I can’t really walk there again without constantly looking over my shoulder. And last weekend during a gap in the rain I walked nervously with Sara on a dirt road above Sandy Bay, until I saw other hikers walking on the road then felt safer.

What we don’t see here are lots of police everywhere. In the southern suburbs we see hundreds of them at Newlands when there is a game of rugby or cricket but otherwise none at all.

In Brazil or at least in Sao Paulo, Manaus and Rio, where I was recently they also used to have a lot of creepy crawlies preying left right and centre on frightened citizens. Now they don’t because there are police everywhere. Police on the beach, police on street corners, police standing outside the shops, police on buses police in cars. All of them steely eyed, stern and foreboding hands resting on the pistols holstered at their hips.

You’d be quite stupid, I imagine, to mug anyone in those cities without expecting to be caught and thrown in jail. Visible policing seems to work. I never got mugged once. Not that I missed be it. But I did notice my guard begin to drop, my sense of fear dissipates and I closed the eyes in the back of my head for a while. So I am not sure why we don’t do that here. Maybe we should play more sport on our street corners or games of rugby and cricket in our back yards. Then there’d be cops everywhere and we’d be safe.