Читать книгу World's Toughest Cops: On the Front Line of the War against Crime - Vinnie Jones - Страница 8

Durban lies on the east coast of South Africa. The busiest port in the continent, it has a population of nearly three and a half million people, and its sandy beaches and subtropical climate have made it a popular tourist destination.

But like everywhere in what they’re calling the ‘Rainbow Nation’, a new society of equality and optimism, Durban has its problems with crime.

There’s not a whole lot of optimism on the streets. And there’s not too much equality either. From armed robbery and gun violence to ATM bombings and carjackings…those getting left behind by the vibrant new South Africa are taking the law into their own hands.

Battling against the crime epidemic is the thin blue line of the South African Police Service – a line stretched almost to breaking point. They’re the ones desperately trying to maintain order against all the odds here; they’re the ones trying to prop up South Africa’s wholesome new image as a safe, friendly place in which to live, work and to holiday. And, right there at the sharp end, often first on the scene, is the Flying Squad, a mobile unit that deals with anything and everything that Durban’s criminals have to offer.

We were embedded with Andre Steyn, an inspector with the Flying Squad – a man who knows these streets better than anyone out here…and who takes his life in his hands every time he clocks on for another shift.

Back in my playing days I once said there weren’t many footballers I’d want beside me in the trenches. Well, I’d want Andre Steyn.

THE MAN IN THE ORANGE TOP and baseball cap shielded his face, turning away and hunching his shoulders. He spoke in a low voice – so low that the cops surrounding him had to lean in to catch his words. We couldn’t pick up anything he was saying.

The officers’ voices came through loud and clear, though. They hit him with a barrage of questions – and leading the interrogation was Inspector Andre Steyn.

‘How are we going to get into the vehicles?’ he demanded. ‘Are they locked? We don’t have a warrant to break the window. If you’re a hundred per cent sure…’

Another cop joined in. ‘Where were the guns fired? Was it outside the club? If we go into the club we are not going to get out the back.’

Steyn again: ‘What are the suspects? Coloured males? White males?’

We were in an underground car park in the centre of Durban – and something big was about to go down. It was past 10 p.m. but Steyn and his team from the Flying Squad were just getting into their stride: their informant had word that security men at a popular nightclub were carrying illegal guns. As they hit their source for details, the air crackled with restrained adrenaline, each of the officers itchy to get going, but smart enough to know that doing so unprepared would be suicide.

‘Will they give over the firearms or will they fight? What is the score?’ demanded Steyn.

Finally, we picked up an audible answer. It wasn’t exactly the one we were hoping for. ‘They’re not just going to give you them like that,’ he muttered. ‘You can expect something. They can give you a fight.’

One of the squad chipped in. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘We hit the outside, then after that one of us has to go inside. Into the offices. Not into the club itself. We can maybe take him into the office, check the office, the safe and all things like that.’

There was a moment of silence, as each of the men took in the info and prepared himself for what was to follow. In the car park the strip lighting hummed and flickered, casting a weird glow over the faces of the cops, before the silence was finally broken by the man we were here to shadow.

Steyn turned to us and grinned. ‘Are you coming? This may be peaceful, maybe not peaceful. It depends on how quick we hit them and how surprised they are. They want to fight? They get fucked up, bro.’

Were we coming? Are you joking? It had been a hell of a night so far…and it was just about to get a whole lot more intense.

Andre Steyn has been an officer with the South African police for nearly 20 years. He’s built like a bull – squat and powerful, with a shaved head like a bullet and the forearms of a wrestler, and he’s made even more bulky and imposing by the body armour he wears the whole time we’re with him. During the day his eyes are hidden behind wraparound shades – at night, you can see they’re steely blue, unwavering, steady. And he’s under no illusions as to the dangers of his job.

‘In the Flying Squad you can get any incident,’ he told us. ‘Policemen get shot, hijackings, armed robberies, house robberies, shooting incidents…you name it, day to day. When a policeman goes to work you never know what to expect. You never know what’s over the hill. Can be armed robbery, can be a house break-in, you can get shot down. When you say goodbye to your loved ones at night, you never know if it’s the last time.

‘Because so many policemen get killed in South Africa, you live day by day. You just have to enjoy the job you do.’

He wasn’t exaggerating, either.

South Africa may be known now as the Rainbow Nation, a country freshly emerged from its troubled and bloody history – but it still bears the scars of its past. For 43 years it was a state divided by the rules of apartheid: where the black population were stripped of their citizenship and denied their basic human rights.

With it came oppression and violence. As civil rights leaders like Nelson Mandela and Stephen Biko were imprisoned or murdered, the population divided along ethnic and economic lines. Massive townships sprang up on the edge of the cities, becoming homes to millions of blacks and Indians who’d been forced out of ‘whites only’ areas. Without investment, facilities and often even basics like running water, they were in stark contrast to the luxurious homes of the white minority rulers.

Resistance grew, however…until, finally, Nelson Mandela’s long walk to freedom in 1991 saw him released from jail and apartheid was abolished. Black and white, rich and poor: everyone was equal now. The shattered country could set about rebuilding itself.

That was the idea, anyway. But if all men were now equal in the eyes of the law, the chasms which divided society for so long have proved less easy to repair. This is still a country of terrible economic inequality, and with the old barriers torn down, crime has rocketed.

The end of apartheid was a new dawn for South Africa, but with it came a terrible hangover and a whole new reputation to live down. A new horror fills the lives of citizens – black and white alike: gun violence.

Each day, more than 300 murders and violent attacks take place here; this country holds the dubious distinction of being the number one nation in the world for assaults, rapes and murders with firearms. In South Africa, there are 50 murders a day and every three days a cop is killed.

South Africa has a population of around 47 million people – that’s six million less than the combined total of England and Wales. Yet in the same year that those two countries witnessed 757 murders, South Africa saw 18,487.

Every year in this place over 100 police officers are killed in the line of duty – roughly two every week. In the UK there have been less than 100 officers killed in the last 50 years.

It’s what makes being a cop here one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. And for Andre Steyn, it’s especially so. As an officer in the Flying Squad, he’s part of a rapid-response unit dealing with the worst the country has to offer – often acting on instinct, relying on a heady cocktail of training and adrenaline to get him through each shift.

‘For every policeman it’s a dangerous job, but ours is just different because we respond to situations as they happen,’ he explained. ‘Any emergency that comes through, we respond. So we’re the first vehicles standing off. You have to be ready for everything; you never know what can happen. It can spark and then you have to be ready for it.’

We were rolling with Steyn on an ordinary night in the streets of South Africa’s third city. This was to climax, it seemed, with the take-down of doormen wielding machine-guns outside a city-centre nightclub, but the hours before weren’t exactly short of incident either. And Steyn himself, we would find out, was no ordinary cop.

The speed at which South Africa has transformed itself is staggering. From global outcasts, the West’s dirty little secret…to shiny, progressive tourist hotspot and World Cup hosts: and all in less than 20 years. It’s change at a breathtaking pace, a roller-coaster ride of reform and renovation.

Some might say it’s happening too fast. Some parts of society just can’t keep up.

And that speed, that urgency, seems to seep through everything here. To outsiders, visitors like us, the effect can be dizzying. Our night with Andre Steyn fitted the same pattern: it was breathless, non-stop, a race against time. There wasn’t a moment to take stock, there wasn’t a second to spare. We sped from one incident to another, covering everything from drink-drivers to dead bodies – and all at a tension level we didn’t experience anywhere else.

Sure, we had scary moments in every place we visited: but in Durban, speeding through the streets with the Flying Squad, chasing the worst this place had to offer, we couldn’t relax for a moment. There just wasn’t time to think.

Andre Steyn isn’t afraid, however.

‘It was my passion to become a policeman,’ he told us. ‘I grew up in a military family. I shot my first gun when I was five or six years old. That’s how I grew up. It’s in me.’

Steyn spent some time in the army in 1991 – the year after Nelson Mandela was freed – and in 1993 enrolled at the Police Academy in Chatsworth, a township originally created for the Indian population of Durban. ‘I was in the first white intake there – and it was like a holiday camp because we were fit from the army,’ he laughs. ‘But, yeah, they teach you the basic police work there: armed SWAT, armed driving, tactical training, computer stuff – you name it, you do it.

‘When I finally became a cop on the streets I was very excited,’ he continued. ‘Yeah, bro – you get your badge, you can’t wait to get your gun, your pistol…I just wanted to get to the job, you know? Work, work, work.’

Work, work, work. Our night with Andre Steyn was work, all right. Hard work, fast work, dangerous work. And, at least it seemed to us, work without a strategy. Maybe that was going on back at HQ, in the corridors of power – but if so, we didn’t see it. Where we were there just wasn’t time. Steyn and his partner were too busy out on the streets, dealing with it all.

Steyn had got word of the meeting in the car park whilst on patrol. The informant had come forward that evening; the Flying Squad would strike that night. It’s the way things work here.

When the call came through we had already been out with Steyn and his partner John Chapman for hours – and we’d seen enough action to fill a whole series of programmes.

Steyn’s a pretty daunting-looking guy at the best of times: it just so happened that that particular night he was especially fired up. We watched him sign out, load up and double-check his weapons in silence, then followed as he led us into the patrol car. The last of the evening sun had turned all of Durban gold, sparkling off the high-rises and shopping centres, and as we slid smoothly along the highways it was easy to forget that we were in one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

He was about to remind us just how dangerous. The night before, an ex-girlfriend of his had been the victim of a carjacking.

Carjacking is one of Durban’s most common crimes – and one of its nastiest. Victims are jumped getting in or out of their vehicles, sometimes even when they’re simply waiting at traffic lights, and forced to drive to one of the townships at gunpoint. Once there, the lucky ones will be robbed and left to find their own way home. All too often, however, the victims are raped, assaulted, even murdered. Most carjackers in Durban are armed with cheap, illegal weapons, including pistols, 9mm semi-automatic machine-guns, even AK47s.

In the Kwazulu Natal district, of which Durban is the capital, carjacking has grown by 40 per cent, and now more than 70 cars are hijacked every single week.

With his eyes unreadable behind the wraparound shades, Steyn filled us in with the details.

‘What happened was that my ex-girlfriend got hijacked last night,’ he said, his voice clipped, short. ‘She went to pick up her son from a fitness class at the gym and a blue Corolla followed her in. Two guys wearing overalls grabbed her – she thought it was her son joking around – but they put a gun to her head, told her to jump in the back seat and they sped off with her in the car. They were driving around with her for 10 minutes before they said, look we don’t want to rape you or kill you, we just want the car and jewellery and anything else you’ve got.

‘They dropped her in Effingham, which is the north side of Durban, on the side of the road, and they gave her her phone back so she could go phone someone. Eventually a guard vehicle picked her up.’

He paused, stared out of the window at the city flashing past, one hand toying with the holster of his sidearm.

‘When I got the call that she had been hijacked and they took her with them in the vehicle, I thought, she’s a beautiful girl, long blonde hair, she’s going to get raped, shot in the head or something. And she’s got a son, a good rugby player, so I really thought, hey, what must I do now? If she gets shot I’ve got to try and find the body, you know? Not a good feeling. Thank God nothing happened.’

We asked him how he felt about it now, starting another shift.

‘It feels weird,’ he said. ‘I was very angry last night, because I’d just finished shift and you work the whole day thinking about the theft of motor vehicles, hijacking and so on, and then you just come off duty and it happens to someone you know. You get a lot of anger, yeah?

‘There was nothing she could do. She was a harmless woman – why go for a harmless female? Cowards, that’s what they are.’

He paused again, and flashed that quick grin. ‘But as I say, every dog has his day. If they must keep on hijacking, if they must keep on doing what they want, then one day they might drive into my police car…and then they are over. Know what I mean?’

As if on cue, his partner Chapman pointed silently out of the window and Steyn snapped back into cop mode. A car in front was behaving suspiciously – we watched as it jumped first one, then another red light.

As we accelerated towards the vehicle, Steyn was already reading the licence plate number into his radio – though as he pointed out later, the problem with carjackings is that the victim doesn’t have time to report the car as stolen, or at least not until it’s too late.

Within seconds we were hard on their bumper and Chapman gave them a flick of the siren. ‘Pull your vehicle off!’ ordered Steyn through a loudspeaker, ‘Pull off now!’ As the car slowed and parked, we were right behind them.

The sun had set now, and outside there was no light other than our headlights. The occupants of the car were just silhouettes: we could see they were two men, but little more than that.

Ordering us to stay put, Steyn and Chapman drew their weapons and cautiously approached. As they stalked towards the car, half-crouching, side-on, flanking the vehicle, hands steady over their guns, Steyn barked orders. ‘Switch your car off. Get out. Get out. Let me see your hands. Get out of the car NOW.’

The two men emerged, slowly, arms raised. To be fair, they looked terrified. ‘Turn around,’ they were ordered. ‘Hands on the roof.’ Both were patted down quickly, expertly, and everyone relaxed a little.

But not much. ‘Why did you run two red lights?’ demanded Steyn, his weapon still drawn. ‘Where’s your driver’s licence? How much have you had to drink?’

These boys weren’t carjackers – but the driver was under the influence. This time they were let off with a slapped wrist…But none of us had ever seen a drink-driver questioned at the point of a machine-gun before.

‘A lot of policemen get shot in South Africa when they just walk up to the car,’ explained Steyn. ‘You can’t just walk up to the car and just say, “Hello sir, get out of the vehicle.” It’s totally different here. They can fire at you. They can shoot you stone dead. Before you know it, your partner’s on the ground and you can’t react. So you have to approach every car tactically. That’s how you survive.’

He wasn’t just reciting training manual theory, either. Steyn and Chapman recently chased and confronted a car containing four armed robbers. It was a chase that quickly became lethal.

‘As we approached the car the guy started firing,’ he explained. ‘The bullets hit the wall behind us, shrapnel hit our bullet-proofs. Came past us like that…unfortunately I had to shoot back at him.’

We pulled back into the Durban night-time traffic and Steyn didn’t seem about to offer any more. So…we eventually asked him what happened. ‘Oh, he was deceased,’ he shrugged. ‘The other three ran away but the next day they were found in hospital with bullet wounds.’