Quote of the week
Early in 2016, a racist outburst by a white woman in KwaZulu-Natal, Penny Sparrow, ridiculing Black beachgoers as ‘monkeys’, and announcing that thenceforth she would ‘address the [B]lacks of South Africa as monkeys’, published in her online profile, was quickly disseminated countrywide. It convulsed South Africa in shame and acrid anger. The [Constitutional] Court was not unaffected. Previous members of the Constitutional Court took comfort in reflecting, with evident satisfaction, on the absence of racially loaded and racially defined splits. Dramatically, these now fractured the Court.
"Rainbows and Realities: Justice Johan Froneman in the Explosive Terrain of Linguistic and Cultural Rights" - Constitutional Court Review
Unfair discrimination by Police
The Minister of Police has not been able to show that no discrimination exists. First, the analytical evidence of Redpath and the data presented shows that police stations that serve poor, Black areas have the lowest police to population ratios, relatively speaking, as compared to wealthier, rich areas which are predominantly White. This is not an adoption of a technical numbers game. Context shows that the poor, Black areas also have the highest rates of contact and violent crime. Whilst, one cannot ignore other crimes, such as theft which appear to occur in greater numbers in commercial areas such as the CBD, it cannot be disputed that contact crime is more prevalent in poor and Black areas.
