Transforming Robocops

Through all the bitter decades of apartheid, the South African Police brutally invaded the everyday lives of ordinary citizens, displaying absolute contempt for human rights. In this book, a respected policing scholar traces the evolution of the specialised 'Public Order' police unit (formerly the Internal Stability Division and the Riot Unit) that was designed to spearhead the apartheid assault. She then takes us intimately and directly into the daily routines of the same unit in the astonishing years of South Africa's political rebirth. Her account becomes a mirror where we see policing in the (uneven) course of its transformation for the utterly different task of guarding and fostering a humane constitutional idealism in the new democracy. The question underlying this account is whether the police can really change. She examines the obstacles to police change and suggests ways of effecting change within police organisations. Monique Marks brings to this remarkable narrative both a wide-ranging scholarly grasp of contemporary developments in global and South African policing and her own gritty recollections of field operations in patrol vans with the men and women of the Durban police unit who accepted her into their working world.