Police Culture and Personal Identity in South Africa

Policing is a product and producer of narratives. Drawing on data collected during an 8-month ethnography in the South African Police Service (SAPS), this article suggests that the SAPS and its organizational culture are best understood as the products of overlap and entanglement of three narrative spheres: the national (South Africa), organizational (SAPS) and personal (officer). Themes common to these narratives are a history of oppression, stark income inequality, the violent nature of its crime, and the general precarity of life. In this context, SAPS officers jostle with other South Africans to secure a better life for themselves and their kin, which in turn shapes police culture and practice. The combination of precarity and organizational and public performance pressures that police face, can produce police practices that echo apartheid era logics of space, place, and race.