There are not so many murders in this township, I think to myself, and not so few policemen, that a killing should be treated like an old woman who has lost her cat.

About a year ago, an entire suburb in this man’s jurisdiction turned from the police and erected a substitute agency. To all intents and purposes, several thousand people here have severed their relationship with the South African Police Service. He appears not to have noticed.

A populace that has given its consent to be policed accepts, save for those rare and atypical moments when there is a genuine threat to the integrity of the underlying order, that in civil life, the police are uniquely entitled to use force, that when they arrive on the scene, everyone else relinquishes the entitlement to use force against them.

The police and the vulnerable are natural allies. That they are so is counterintuitive and strange, for they also loathe one another.

Most of the men thrown into the back of the van that night were drunk, but none was in public: each was in his own home. And yet not one of them questioned the legality of his arrest. After nearly a dace of democracy, each assumed that the cops had every right to drag him out of his home and throw him in prison.