Policing and Human Rights: The meaning of violence and justice in the everyday policing of Johannesburg

Abstract

First things first: Julia Hornberger has written a very competent, original, and thought-provoking book on the fate of human rights, as their protagonists encounter – and endeavour to change – policing in Johannesburg. One hopes that it will soon be available in paperback to allow for the greater readership it deserves. Hornberger makes her point of departure the coexistence of human rights as ‘hyper-reality’ and the radical absence of human rights (pp. 6–7), especially within the police. Drawing on a number of scholars, not least Bourdieu, she explains the paradox through class, culture, and history. In contrast to the police, human rights are associated with cosmopolitanism, higher education, and English. Hence it is no surprise, she suggests, that a human rights' approach is met with disagreement from within the police force, and that the police, her prime interlocutors, make something different out of human rights than what is intended by human rights activists. To capture how police engage with human rights, Hornberger chooses the term ‘forging’ over other terms like ‘appropriate’, ‘negotiate’, ‘translate’ or ‘manoeuvre’. By choosing this term she aims to signal the ‘crafting’ and the ‘doing’ while simultaneously implying inherently informal, illicit activities associated with ‘wrongdoing’ (pp. 10–13). This is one of the more important contributions of the book, as it questions the scholarship, including my own, that somehow suggests human rights have been distorted from an ideal in their encounter with the everyday practice of policing. Invoking the parallel term of counterfeit rights, she suggests that the ‘fakes’ are ‘the more original, at least in [their] prevalence in the world’ (p. 174). Furthermore, it is not only the police that forge something out of human rights, but also the population that the police must service, as well as the international world of human rights as it sets out to implement the ideal.