This article first appeared in Vice in August 2013 and then in The Mail and Guardian in September 2013.

The names of the Metro
officers have been changed.

A Metro Cop tackles a man seen beating a woman on a street in Lavender Hill.

Ibrahim
won’t stop talking, going on about how he’s persecuted and religious and
generally as innocent as a newborn lamb. His whinging is a relentless
soundtrack for this dingy room. The cops don’t tell him to shut up. The Cape
Town Metro Substance Abuse Unit just get on with the job at hand: searching
through all of Ibrahim’s shit, looking for drugs.

They
don’t find much – some marijuana and a “tik lolly”, a small test tube with a
glass bubble at the end made exclusively for smoking methamphetamine. Ibrahim
goes on and on and on, wailing about how he is the only person who gets
searched, how he has rights. Then one of the cops pulls out a massive pile of
porn and at last Ibrahim is quiet.

It’s
easy to find Ibrahim’s house in Bellville, just away metres away from the rows
of second hand shops and fast food joints in Voortrekker Road. It’s the double
storey with a pool and a Mercedes parked outside the garage, but that’s not
quite how it should be described. The pool is empty and full of trash, as is
the roofless garage. The Mercedes clearly doesn’t run, and if it did the draft
from the smashed rear window mixed with the rotting trash on the back seat
would make for a poor ride.

Inside, we’re faced with the stench of rotting food and human faeces.
The smell gets deep into your clothes and up your nostrils, before lodging
itself in your brain and sporadically reemerging throughout the day. The floor
is sticky and crudely-written Arabic drips down the walls in green spray-paint.

It’s 10am but it’s pitch black inside the house. I follow an officer we’ll
call James upstairs and he points to a closed door with handwritten warning to
cops scrawled on it. Inside the room two women sit washing clothes in
plastic basins while two toddlers lie on the bed. I step inside but a new, even
more pungent smell forces me back. James giggles and points to the bath; it’s
overflowing with sewage.

These are the living conditions of low-level dealers in the Western Cape
– one of the world’s most concentrated hotspots for meth, alcohol abuse, rape,
murder and gangsterism. According to SAPS in the 2011/2012 year there were 2 300
murders in the Western Cape and 77 069
drug-related crimes. Why don’t we have exact numbers for the 2012/2013 year?
Good question – SAPS decided to only release a percentage increase and decrease
to the stats this year so nobody knows the exact numbers. We do know the
Western Cape has a similar number of murders to Gauteng each year, despite having
almost half the population. Crimestats SA says nearly 40% of South African drug
crimes are committed in the Western Cape. But statistics only help so much when
they are already 6 months out of date when released. Africa Check, an
organisation that studies the crime data and interprets it intelligently, says
we should be getting our hands on monthly crime stats instead. Bogota in
Colombia changed the way they released, studied and responded to crime stats
and managed to reduce their murder rate by 71% in 10 years. The Metro Cops I
have been travelling with don’t know the crime stats well, and they don’t
really care – their task is to hunt down one drug dealer at a time, slowly
pushing back against the tide.

“Ibrahim” in his room during a drug search in Bellville, Cape Town.

The pool at “Ibrahim’s” house, Bellville, Cape Town.

A Metro officer searches “Ibrahim’s” room in Bellville, Cape Town.

A “Tik Lolli” (Meth Pipe) found during a search in “Ibrahim’s” room

“Ibrahim” waits while his room is searched

My escorts through the bottom end of the drug business are James, a
cheeky, English-speaking cop with an infectious giggle and a huge Afrikaans
bear of a man who goes by the nickname “Fluffy”. They drive a rusted Metro unit undercover
car and wear plain clothes.

James
reminds me that big time marijuana dealers are just as violent as other
dealers. “People think, ‘oh it’s just grass’, but they lie and cheat and kill,
just like the crack dealers” he says.

Captain
Althea Jafta, a petite pixie of
a woman is in charge of the drug unit. I say petite, but she would mess up a
Springbok rugby payer without breaking a sweat. Everyone knows who Captain
Jafta is: cops, dealers, users. During a house search for a notorious gangster
she hugs his wife and emerges from a bedroom cuddling a puppy. She’s
funny, smart and likeable, and the other unit members clearly go into a kind of
protection mode when she’s around.

I
think partly because they are bored and partly to show off, the unit of eight
Metro drug cops that I’m riding with hit a “drug bar” in the newly hipstered, still
pretty crummy area of Main Road in Woodstock. A drug bar is where you can purchase
the narcotic of your choice and then consume your order right then and there,
maybe even getting a little sleep afterwards.

The
building has a steel door opening onto Main Road serving to delay the cops’
entry just long enough so the guys inside have time to run out the back or
flush the goods down the toilet. Despite this we still manage to get a decent
stash of tik and grass. Two dealers, barely adults, are arrested. Stoned users
crawl out of every conceivable space into the building’s courtyard. They are
searched, face down, and told to fuck off.

All
these users and dealers have seemed quite amicable, doing what they’re told and
taking their cavity searches like men, so to speak. But when we hit a drug
house in the excruciatingly
awful suburb of Brooklyn, the guy who appears to be the main dealer, sporting
shades and weightlifting gloves, refuses to put his hands on the wall. He turns
and moves towards one of the cops in a menacing way. He gets a full force smack
on the side of his ribs with an open hand that takes the wind out of him and he
duly places his palms on the wall.

Later Fluffy explains: “Gangsters need to know who is in charge when we
arrive. If we go in weak it sends the wrong message to these guys, and cops
could die.”

Suspects line up to be searched

A suspect is forced to the ground

A Metro officer threatens a teddy

The members of the unit chase down meth addicts and apprehend gangsters
armed with anything from a rusty butter knife to a stolen .45. But the first
hint of fear I spot is when we hit the home of a mid-level dealer and encounter
their arch nemeses. Dogs.

“I fucking hate dogs,” says James as he cocks his 9mm Glock. It’s the
first time I see any of the men unholster their guns. Last year James tells me
he had to empty his full clip into an attacking Rottweiler while its owner
jumped over a back wall with his drug stash.

I can just see past four Metro cops through the open door into the yard
of the house. The young men inside the yard have a pit bull on a chain and are
seriously struggling to keep it under control. It’s up on its back legs,
barking frantically and straining against the chain. There’s a lot of shouting
and cocking of guns and eventually the young men manage to get the dog inside
the house where it’s locked in a room, wheezing from the damage inflicted on
its neck.

We enter the yard and six men are forced on the ground and searched. A
young pit bull with two puppies barks constantly from inside a cage. As she
grows, I’m told, she’ll be trained to attack. There is another dog, in a sealed
wooden box, which head butts the door with all its force. One of the suspects
is ordered to lean against it, an extra barrier between the cops and the canine.

Five feet away a woman dishes out chips to two young children and fries
up some kind of meat paste from a tube like all this commotion is just as
trivial as the washing up she’s about to do. We don’t find any drugs.

A young pit bull mother in her cage while a suspect lies on the ground.

Pictures on the wall of a suspected drug house

A woman with her dog during a search of a suspected drug house

A
few months ago Wesley Woodman – a South African Police Service traffic cop -
pulled over a driver and gave him a ticket for a minor violation. That would
normally be an uneventful evening in Cape Town, but this was in Lavender Hill,
halfway between the city and Muizenburg. It cost both the cop and the driver
their lives.

The
story goes that the driver was a gangster. A rival gang, happening across the
scene, decided this was a great setup: kill the rival, kill the cop, take the officer’s
gun as a bonus. As a result members of Metro drug and gang units, tactical
response and SAPS are told to show the Lavender Hill gangs a lesson.

The
situation has become so bad Western
Cape premier Helen Zille wants government to deploy the army to relieve the
pressure on SAPS and Metro.

The
Metro units of traffic, street and specialist cops are run by the city but they
often work alongside the normal SAPS. SAPS rarely grant interviews, under the
belief that any press is bad press. Metro is different. They agree to let me tag
along on for a few days so I can understand what working in Lavender Hill is
really like.

It
is broad daylight here but the cops still drive in mini convoys. Everyone holds
their Glocks close, even the drivers. The township looks like a halfway camp
made of tin sheeting and wood and sewage. Shacks and houses are built so one
car can just barely pass by on the watery sludge they use as roads.
Unfortunately those same roads are littered with children, dogs, unidentified
pieces of cars and dealers.

At
random, Metro pounce on some young men on a corner. One seems a teenager and
baby faced. But the cop holding him lifts up his T-shirt to show me the “Mr No
Good” tattooed on his chest and the J.F.K on the back of his neck. On closer inspection his
eyes are bloodshot and seeping. He’s a junior member of The Junky Funky Kids (The
J.F.Ks) a medium sized gang in these parts. They have been caught in a war with
The Americans and The Hard Livings Gang for years. I’m told that Rashied
Staggi, leader of The Hard Livings, is being released from prison soon. Everyone’s
on edge.

A
cute girl crosses the street next to us. James sees me glance at her.

“It
must suck to be a pretty girl here”, I say. “Or a pretty boy. Or anyone,” he
giggles. “If you are a father of a pretty girl your life is shit. Either let
the gangsters take her or die standing up to them”.

Four
girls, around seven years old, practice writing their alphabets outside their
home while Metro cops stomp around, searching the grass and trash. The girls
watch with interest, but I gather this is a common event. The unit finds a
stash of tik, glass “lollies”, mandrax and marijuana, barely a metre away from
the children.

“I
got a weekender,” shouts one. “I got an outfit,” betters the unit leader we’ll
call Wynand.

“A
weekender is enough marijuana to get through two days”, Wynand explains. “An
outfit is half a mandrax tablet and one joint’s worth of grass that you can
smoke together to get totally off your face.” The kids go back to writing their homework.

The
sun has just set. It’s almost pitch black – this section of Lavender Hill has few
streetlights and only very intermittent, hijacked electricity to some houses. Wynand
rests his gun on the steering wheel and looks around nervously.

“We’ll
probably have a pot shot taken at us”, he says, “but actually I stress more because
we could run over a kid very easily.” I slide from the window to the middle of
the back seat. They gave me a bulletproof vest but my head and neck are feeling
terribly exposed.

We
continue some searches without a real plan into the night. It becomes tedious. James
reminds me that that is exactly when you die, with your guard down, late at
night.

It’s
1am and end of shift is coming in two hours so now it’s time for logistics. It
takes at least three cops an hour and a half to book an arrested suspect into the
system. There are eight cops on duty tonight, we have one arrested suspect in
the van that needs to be booked, so it makes good sense to try and pick up
another one before heading off to the station.

“How
are you going to find someone with enough stuff on them to be booked as a
dealer in the space of 20 min?” I ask.

Wynand
answers by pointing to a man walking down the street ahead of us. “Him,” he
says. Sure enough the young man has some tik on him, separated nicely into one
hit plastic packets. The cop who searched the kid holds out his hand so I can
see the grimy packets.

A
small group of women and children are watching us from across the road. The cop
looks at them and shakes his head. “Babies on the street at midnight,” he
sighs.

I
wonder out loud what’s keeping the poor communities of the Western Cape from
rising up and taking power. “Well,” says the cop, ironically, “we have the drugs. It keeps them down. Be
thankful for that”.

Vice, Aug 2013

Mail and Guardian, Sept 2013

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Cape Town Druglands (Vice)