Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (18 page)

‘They deal in Tik,’ said Nico, referring to the locally produced crystal meth, ‘or mandrax, marijuana, heroin. But the crystal meth here is the biggest seller. And all the shootings around here are gang-related: it’s about competing drug territories. They’re armed up – Tauruses, CZ 75s, Glocks. It’s mainly 9mm handguns.’

Manenberg, with its 70,000 residents, had fourteen homicides and fifty-six attempted murders in the summer of 2013 alone. This year it was even worse: thirty killings in the first four months. The locals said the police were failing in their job.
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It even prompted the Western Cape premier to call for the army to be deployed. In the first nine months of 2013 there had been over 1,200 arrests. But the area was far from settled. Randall told me to wind down the windows so I could hear the gunshots, and we entered the roughest public-housing district of the roughest area of Cape Town.

The walls were covered with scrawled gang graffiti: turf marked out like wild cats pissing on trees. The Hard Livings controlled this area – the tag ‘HL$’ everywhere. The remaining areas were divided between the smaller gangs: the Young Dixie Boys, the Naughty Boys, the Junky Funky Kids – unsaid boundaries on every street. Almost 90 per cent of people living here felt there were parts of Manenberg they could never go.
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Nico was talking. ‘The coloureds here have no discipline. I’m not a racist but since ’94 things have changed, but not for them. The whites used to be in charge. Now it’s the blacks in charge. The coloureds are stuck in the middle. Sometimes they want to act like whites, sometimes like blacks. This is the problem.’

The Numbers gang, the 27, 28 and 29, were the worst, he said. A four-year-old had been raped and burned by some of them. Then he described how Numbers members were thought to be behind the recent shooting of two cops near Manenberg.
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A tattooed youth had fired into the prostrate officers as they lay in the dust, shooting one of them through the head. He had taken the firearm from the other. This was a high accolade for gang members here: to become
a cop killer. Better still if he got a gun.
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I looked out of the window and wondered if the police made me more of a target.

Our police car slowly turned and shifted gear, and we were deep into the heart of the district. This dirty grass and stone and concrete land was a scar on the conscience of South Africa. Unemployment in Manenberg was as high as 66 per cent – poverty clung to the houses like mould.

There was a click. Randall slotted a round into his shotgun.

The roads were layered with rubbish, kids playing listlessly. The homes here looked the same as prison compounds or military barracks – straight lines of municipal bare concrete infused with hopelessness. The only colour was the graffiti. Boys stood at a faded corner and stared at us, sullen-eyed.

‘The gangs use these young children to hide the guns – they are the runners,’ said Nico. ‘And the watchers.’ Everyone knew everyone here; strangers were noted. Of the 200 people killed in gang violence in Cape Town in the last year, over two-thirds knew their killer.

We passed a group of plain-clothes police carrying bushels of dagga plants, the local name for marijuana, from a house, their faces brushing up against the heady green leaves. Another car pulled up beside us. A bad-tempered policeman in the front ignored the tear-stained woman in the back; she was begging for forgiveness, her voice rising with each cry. She’s being taken in for a drugs violation, he told us, but she wasn’t the person the police were wanting to arrest that day.

A dozen warrants had been issued for known gang members in these streets, and there were two more to be picked up. That was why we were here. One of those was wanted in connection with three firearms linked to a specific murder. Then a call came over the radio: the suspect had been seen. He was wearing a white T-shirt, and the crackling voice said he had a gun on him. Nick’s foot pulsed on the accelerator.

He drove a hard left, then right, and we hit the pavement and spilled out, chasing breathlessly down a side road into a labyrinth of unnamed streets. Two other armed police were ahead of me, arms
outstretched, pistols out, safety catches off. They called out and pushed towards the copper-brown shacks. An old coloured woman, hair in curlers, appeared above, wide-eyed. Perhaps she was right to be scared. Shootings here were harried, spray-in-the-air acts of madness. In the past the old gang violence was more ritualised – gangs battled at an appointed time at night in open fields beyond the residential perimeter, to prevent injury to innocent residents. Today it was more close your eyes and fire blindly – particularly if you were trapped by some fast-approaching police.

I expected a sudden burst of gunfire, but none came. The runner had disappeared. We went through the ramshackle lanes with their pools of hidden shadows and out onto the next sun-blinded street, and there was nobody there except one man wearing a red-stained T-shirt. He was bleeding heavily, because someone had struck him full in the mouth. His neck and chest were covered in tattoos, markings of the gang number 28. He walked past the police and did not stop. His bleeding was his concern, not theirs.

The police were never going to be seen as friends in this area. Over 40 per cent of the people here thought they took protection money from gangsters. And over 80 per cent said the police would not be able to protect them if they wanted to be a witness in a murder trial.
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So why would a gang member go to them over a split lip?

There was a certain truth in the wounded man’s attitude. Later, researching the South African police, I learned that in every month in this country’s first seven years of democracy there was an average of thirty-six deaths ‘as a result of police action’ – 91 per cent of those being shot.
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The cops here had an image problem.

The gun dogs were out of the cars, barking, but the moment had been lost. The children that rested on each street corner had long ago spread the news that the law was around; those who were sought were gone.

Nico’s hair was matted with sweat, and you couldn’t tell if it was the heat or fear that had done it. The operation was drawing to a close; the sun had reached its zenith, and it would be hours before a criminal with a gun would venture out to reclaim the streets and
the night. The gun units would have to return another day, and my press embed was up.

Besides, the dogs were tired.

Police forces in the states of California, New York and Florida had all refused my request to observe a US Special Weapons and Tactics – SWAT – team raid. Many others never returned my call. So the email from Nevada was not a surprise.

‘It is against our policy publicize our tactics [sic.] and our police department does not allow ride-alongs on raids due to privacy issues. We will be unable to accommodate your request,’ wrote Larry Hadfield of the LVMPD from Las Vegas’s Martin Luther King Boulevard.

This was frustrating, because I knew there were about 50,000 SWAT raids in the US every year, and their refusal felt like another slap in the face. So the email later that day from Chris, a police sharpshooter I had been talking to, was a good one. ‘Happy to meet,’ he wrote. Then he added that phrase that makes your heart sink: ‘but it will have to be off record’.

It’s always like this. Soldiers and policemen are inevitably cagey when it comes to speaking to journalists; when they agree to meet they think it’s a Deep Throat exposé. So on the one hand you have saccharine police embeds, on the other you have a culture of silence. It’s no wonder the police often get away with so much. But Chris was my small entry into what had become a massive issue in the US: the ongoing militarisation of their boys in blue. So we met.

He was one of four sharpshooters in a twenty-one-member SWAT team in a mid-size midwest town and had been in that job for about six years. He had a good lifestyle, earning just over $70,000 in a county where the average salary was $47,000. And because he had to do regular fitness tests – a timed 1.5-mile run, sit-ups, push-ups, bench presses – he was fit. The polo shirt he was wearing was tight-fitting, and his arms filled the sleeves. But
his eyes were dull, and it did not take me long to realise that this man was going to give very little away.

‘We shoot every other week for about four hours each session, up to 1,000 yards down range,’ he said. ‘We train to put down a target with a single shot. We aim for either a headshot or the chest area.’ In the situations he would find himself in, you don’t try to wound. One survey of American police sharpshooters found that 80 per cent of all recorded incidents were fatal – about half hit the head.
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It takes a certain skill to be able to do that.

‘So what sets you apart from other officers?’ I asked.

‘The single difference between me and my SWAT team members is patience,’ he said. It means he often has to spend hours doing surveillance. ‘Most of the SWAT guys want to get in and do something – “go, go go” – but my role is more monitoring, watching, calling in about tactical concerns, blocking the path of entry and exit of the criminal.’

He looked a little disconsolate. ‘I guess it is not as fun, not as exciting and adrenaline crazy.’

I asked him if he had any regrets, and he said he had used his rifle only the once to lethal effect.

‘The guy had beaten up his wife and had a history of mental problems.’

He didn’t want to elaborate, but five team members had fired at the same time.

‘It makes you think though . . .’ he said, with the trace of a southern twang, ‘was the guy mentally ill? Could he have been talked out of it before he came out with a gun?’ But he had never lost sleep over it and he loved his job.

‘I stop the bad guys from getting to hurt the good guys,’ he said. It was a simple and uncomplicated way of viewing things.

Yet I was disturbed by what he had told me about that mentally ill man, and the more I read about the world of the police sniper, the more disturbed I became. There were stories of sixteen-year-olds, distraught at bad exam marks, threatening to take their own lives with the family shotgun, then being killed by over-zealous police sharpshooters.
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Tales of police snipers in camouflage suits being sent
into the home of paranoid men in crisis, schizophrenics threatening to cut their wrists.
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It struck me this was a world where the gun could easily cause situations to escalate: the inevitable police armed response in the US transforming events into things far worse. And the more I dug, the more I realised how bad the situation had become.

In May 2010 a team of six armed police in Nassau County in the state of New York was granted a warrant for a no-knock entry to a home. They were after someone in that Long Island house who, their informant had told them, was selling drugs. Their intelligence, however, didn’t say that the address they were raiding was two apartments, not one. So when the policemen battered down the door of the downstairs flat and charged in with rifles, voices puncturing the dawn silence, they were faced with an impassable staircase.

‘Alternate breach!’ they screamed and then rushed outside to knock down the door of the other flat, high on the excitement and the drama.

Iyanna Davis, a twenty-two-year-old, had been woken sharply in the early hours of that May day. Confused, she had hidden in her closet, the violent commotion in the downstairs unit terrifying her. She did not know the intruders were police officers and assumed her home was under attack by thugs. She certainly did not see two of New York State’s finest, Michael Capobianco and Carl Campbell, enter her home dressed like soldiers of death – in heavy black boots, thick black combat trousers and black helmets. They were carrying semi-automatics.

The police were later to tell conflicting tales of what happened next. The first story was that Iyanna had leaped from the closet, causing them to open fire. The second was that Iyanna had held the closet door shut against their attempts to open it, causing officer Capobianco to fall down and his rifle to go off. Either way, Iyanna was shot – a single bullet that hit her in the breast and ricocheted
through her body, piercing her abdomen and both thighs.