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Face to face with police brutality
Marko Phiri
June 11, 2006

http://www.thestandard.co.zw/viewinfo.cfm?linkid=21&id=1476

THIS is a day I will never forget. It was Friday 2 June around 8PM when a grey Renault sedan came speeding towards me at breakneck speed. Never mind that I was standing on the edge of the road.

Naturally, I jumped off the kerb and confronted the driver who I suspected was driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs or both.

As I approached the car, somebody inside yelled my name. Muttering expletives, I asked what the big idea was scaring me like that, and that was my first bad move. Out jumped two men while the driver and another man remained in the car. And remember this was a civilian vehicle.

"Uthethisa amapholisa wena?" the two men yelled as they immediately started pummelling me. I was handcuffed and told they were going to shove me in theboot of their car if I did not keep quiet.

Kicking and screaming, I was thrown in the car, and when I heard the typical noises of a walkie-talkie, I thought these guys aren’t bluffing. They were indeed cops! They were in their casuals; the car they were in was not marked.

Still, I was supposed to have known these people trying a hit and run on me were policemen!

As I protested demanding to know what the hell was going on, the handcuffs were tightened and I was slapped all over the face. I still have the bruises on my wrists and face as I write this article.

It was dark in the car and I peered into their faces to see who these people were, but the guy with the hardest punches hid his face from me with his jacket. As I tried in the dark to identify the person who had yelled my name, I saw a chap I went to school with sitting silently next to me while his mates tormented me!

I asked the man whom I knew to be a cop what I was doing in the car. It turned out this was a private car and the driver had allegedly been harassed by three young lager louts who had had one too many of the inebriating stuff.

The driver himself had no clue as to the identity of the people they were looking for as he would see a group of people, stop and say something like "this looks like them!" So, it turns out I must have "looked like them" to be picked up like that! As I groaned under the stinging cuffs, the car sped to a neighbouring township.

I had been picked up just a few metres from my home, and the super cop I went to school with sat silently as I remonstrated with him for letting his mates assault a law-abiding citizen, and when he knew they had picked me up virtually in front of my gate as he knows where I stay.

The response of the other cops was that I had used foul language on law officers hence the hard punches I had to endure. As we drove into the other township, the driver identified his tormentors and the cops jumped out of the car and the drunk young men were slapped so hard I thought I could see sparks flying off their faces! They were then bundled into the car, and we were taken to the police post where I was to be detained until Sunday morning for a crime I still have no clue about.

I had no money in my pocket to pay the admission of guilt fine of $250 000 they were demanding so these super cops threw me into a police cell together with the young men who were being accused of beating up the driver of the Renault sedan who had volunteered his car to fight crime. Good citizen isn’t he?

My receipt is written "conduct likely to breach the peace" and I am still trying to figure out what the hell that means. You hear stories about police brutality, but wait till you experience this first hand.

Now that the government has set up its own human rights watchdog, during the time in the cells, I wondered whether this was not a case for this watchdog if it is to be taken seriously. This being the cold month of June, being in a cell was a nightmare I would never wish for anybody, except perhaps the cops who punched me in the face and threw me in the stinking cells.

My thoughts then were: "this is what the Siberian holding camps must have felt like for Stalin’s guests."

It appears part of the curriculum for Zimbabwean policemen is to treat law-abiding citizens and everybody else like people with no rights.

Momentarily forgetting the pain in my wrists and bleeding face, I laughed when one of the young men started yelling at the cops at the Charge Office that he knew his rights.

It was typical Dutch courage, and I asked him if he knew what he was talking about. But his ranting and raving only urged on the cops who summarily refused to take his fine and told him the cells were going to cool him down! What is it about this country that people have resigned themselves to abuses from the police?

Like the brutal white cops of yesteryear, post-independence black cops still expect to get away with abusing innocent citizens without recourse.

I suspect such tales abound in today’s Zimbabwe where the police seem to operate above the laws they are employed to uphold.

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