Following the shooting and killing of Nathaniel Julies in Eldorado Park on 26 August and the attempts to cover up his death by members of the South African Police Service (SAPS), the distrust in SAPS from residents in Eldorado Park and other marginalised communities has come into sharp focus again.

Past responses to criminal activity in these communities – from the south of Johannesburg, to the Cape Flats and Nelson Mandela Bay – suggest that perceptions of the police as brutal enforcers still persist, and that residents themselves continue to look for alternative ways of dealing with crime rather than trust the police. Tie to this the politicisation of policing and you have a hotbed of negative relationships between residents, law enforcement and political formations, which often turns the community into political fodder with no real remedy for their policing needs.

Journalist and broadcaster Lester Kiewit will moderate this conversation on the politics of policing in marginalised communities between Terry-Ann Adams, commentator and author of Those Who Live in Cages, Axolile Notywala, a 2020 fellow with the Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity, and Eldred de Klerk, a senior policing and social conflict specialist with the Africa Centre for Security and Intelligence Praxis (ACSIP).

The politics of policing marginalised communities. 'Those Who Live in Cages' by Terry-Ann Adams