07/05/2026
There is a peculiar constitutional theatre that unfolds daily in South Africa.
A citizen walks into a police station carrying fear, violation, urgency — perhaps blood still drying on a shirt, perhaps the smell of alcohol on the breath after surviving an assault at a tavern, perhaps only panic and fragmented words after a traumatic event.
And somewhere between the charge office counter and the docket shelf, citizenship itself becomes negotiable.
“No vehicle available.”
“Come back tomorrow.”
“You are drunk.”
“It’s a domestic matter.”
“Open a case first.”
“Wait for the investigating officer.”
Sometimes the complaint enters the Occurrence Book but never reaches prosecutorial life. Sometimes the docket enters administrative purgatory. Sometimes justice is delayed until death makes the matter socially inconvenient to ignore.
Then communities say:
> “The police only act when someone dies.”
But there is another sentence South Africans say with equal conviction:
> “You will say the police do not work until they knock on your door.”
And therein lies the jurisprudential paradox of the postcolony.
The same institution accused of absence is also the institution summoned in crisis.
The same state that communities distrust is the same state they still expect to rescue them from violence.
This contradiction is not irrational. It is the anatomy of a wounded constitutional democracy.
As an Indigenous Health Knowledge Systems (IHKS) scientist-clinician, I often observe how institutional trust behaves similarly to health itself. A body can be chronically inflamed and still remain alive. A patient may criticise a hospital system while still depending on it for survival. Likewise, citizens may condemn policing structures while still recognising the catastrophic vacuum that emerges in the total absence of lawful authority.
Decolonial scholarship teaches us that state institutions in the Global South are not experienced uniformly.
Law does not arrive equally.
Protection does not arrive equally.
Dignity does not arrive equally.
For some South Africans, a police station is a gateway to remedy.
For others, it is a site of procedural humiliation.
And yet we must also resist the intellectual laziness of reducing all police officers into caricatures of incompetence or brutality. Many operate within impossible ecologies:
- under-resourcing,
- psychological trauma,
- violent environments,
- administrative overload,
- forensic collapse,
- staff shortages,
- political interference,
- and communities that simultaneously fear and resent them.
This does not excuse misconduct.
But serious jurisprudence demands structural analysis beyond outrage.
The deeper crisis is not merely crime.
It is legitimacy.
The moment citizens begin believing that:
- rights end at the police station gate,
- reporting crime is futile,
- only politically connected people receive justice,
- or the dead receive more procedural attention than the living,
- the constitutional order begins haemorrhaging moral authority.
Then vigilantism emerges.
Then parallel systems emerge.
Then private security replaces public trust.
Then violence becomes conversational.
And perhaps that is the uncomfortable warning hidden inside the phrase:
> “You will only say the police do not work until they knock on your door.”
Because what South Africans may actually fear is not simply ineffective policing.
It is the possibility of no policing at all.
A society where citizens no longer believe the state can hear them before the obituary is written.
