BOOK REVIEW: Good Cop, Bad Cop: Confessions of a Reluctant Policeman
DESPITE its police-blue cover complete with a badge, Good Cop, Bad Cop is not a history of the South African Police Service (SAPS) but a searing personal account of illustrious author Andrew Brown’s intimate relationship with the men in blue.They know the contours of his body for they beat it, suffocated it, half-drowned it and mock-assassinated Brown when he was an 18-year-old student activist in the late 1980s.Now he’s an advocate in Cape Town who has spent nearly 20 years as a police reservist sergeant on the beat at nights and on weekends in some of the Cape Peninsula’s worst townships. That includes Nyanga, which Brown says "is the murder capital of the world. About 300 people are killed there annually."His role swap from angry protester against the apartheid police to a cop who increasingly has to deal with angry communities protesting about a lack of basic amenities sometimes confuses him. "It’s not as if I can stand there in good conscience and say, ‘you are wrong’ when they...
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