Opinion | Sending in the army

Soldiers from the South African National Defence Force are going to be deployed alongside members of the South African Police Service to combat gangs and armed groups associated with illegal mining. The announcement by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in his State of the Nation address in mid‑February received the support of opposition political parties, including the Democratic Alliance and the Economic Freedom Fighters. I have studied militarised forms of policing for many years.

The findings of my research suggest that there are both positive and negative aspects to these kinds of interventions. There are clear drawbacks to the domestic deployment of the military in a policing role. But, under certain conditions, there have been crime reduction effects.

The military have been deployed to assist the police in crime fighting (including combating gang violence) in South Africa on regular occasions since the late 1990s. It was commonplace during the 1980s in apartheid South Africa. Examples include Operation Recoil (1997), Operation Slasher (2001), Operation Combat (2012), Operation Thunder (2018) and Operation Lockdown (2019).

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The defence force was also deployed alongside the police in 2020 to enforce Covid‑19 lockdown restrictions. This situation is not unique to South Africa. Numerous countries, such as Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Kenya, Mexico, and the United States, have used their militaries for policing.

Police are, at times, not sufficiently capable of responding to specific criminal dangers due to their hyper‑violent nature or due to constraints such as a lack of resources, inadequate training, and corruption. The military sometimes takes on policing roles when a government wants to demonstrate that it is capable of containing criminal threats. To date there has been no comprehensive multi‑country research on the impact of military involvement in combating crime.

Existing studies indicate that the crime reduction effect of using the military for policing is limited. There is also evidence that the use of the military in crime‑fighting operations has led to human rights abuses in some contexts.

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