Between legality and legitimacy – how the police actually operate in Africa

State police forces in Africa are a curiously neglected subject of study, even within the framework of security issues and African states. A new book “Police in Africa” (Hurst, 2017) brings together scholars from different disciplines to provide street-level perspectives from below and inside Africa’s police forces.

DIIS senior researcher Helene Maria Kyed has contributed with a chapter on the police in Mozambique with the title “Inside the Police Stations in Maputo City: between legality and legitimacy”. It explores the everyday operations of the state police, who invest enormous amounts of time in helping poor urban citizens to resolve minor disputes and crimes inside the police station, yet outside state legal procedures.

While these practices are not in line with the rule of law, thereby contributing to an image of the police as operating in often-illegal ways, the chapter shows that the police resolve matters informally based on requests from the public. They do it to obtain some form of popular legitimacy, rather than to get extra incomes and bribes. According to popular perceptions, a ‘good’ police officer is someone with whom you can negotiate settlements on the spot and who does not strictly follow the law.

The informalization of state policing is informed by the distrust that most people – not least the urban poor – have in the legal system and the judicial process, which are seen as slow, expensive and biased towards those litigants who can pay bribes. For many people the law itself does not provide any justice. Consequently, many prefer to have their cases resolved outside legal procedures through informal processes and immediate forms of justice. This has opened a space for civilian forms of policing and dispute resolution, and it also supports the role of the police in informal case handling.

These everyday practices of the police are rendered invisible to those international and national organizations that are working with rule of law and police reform in Mozambique. Rather there is a tendency to simply focus on the illegal and illegitimate aspects of policing, like human rights violations and corruption. This narrow focus is highly critical, because it prevents an in-depth understanding of how the police work and perceive their role in relation to the public. Blindness to the more benevolent and informal practices also misses out on the most common interactions between police and citizens, including how the police negotiate and reconstitute their authority in the everyday.

More about the book
The book covers unique ethnographies of the police in a range of countries, including Mozambique, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Congo, Ghana and Niger. The different contributions consider historical trajectories and particular configurations of police power within wider political systems and then examine the inside view of police forces as state institutions, including challenges, self-perceptions and professional ethics. Finally, they look at how African police officers go about their work in terms of everyday practices and engagements with the public.

This was said about the book
‘Combining historical, anthropological and political approaches to the police, this remarkable collection of case studies offers a crucial addition to the analysis of an institution regrettably understudied in Africa. A thorough and scrupulous inquiry into the ordinary work of law enforcement, it is a unique contribution to the comprehension of the repressive arm of the African state.’ - Didier Fassin, Visiting Professor, Princeton University, author of Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing

‘A remarkable ethnography, countering the dominant narrative on the corruption of law enforcement in particular and of the state in general. Not only does the book shed light on state formation in Africa, but it can also help us to reflect on the crisis of the police institution in Western countries.’ - Jean-François Bayart, Honorary Research Fellow, Sciences Po CERI, author of The State in Africa