We're all in this together ... not

I’m tired of hearing how I need to play a role in fighting crime. In the wake of Lucky Dube’s shooting last week, President Mbeki said we should “act together as a people to confront this terrible scourge of crime”. The Ministry of Arts and Culture said in a statement that “crime is a South African problem and every one of us in this country must play our role in fighting it”.

If not doing crime is playing a role in fighting crime, then I’m cool with that. If the president or Pallo Jordan wants me to don a flak jacket and get out there, leopard-crawling through the streets of Johannesburg looking for baddies, then they’ve got the wrong guy. I briefly considered a career as a policeman but then saw how badly they get paid for walking counter-intuitively toward gunfire instead of running like the blazes in the other direction.

Asking the nation to “all play a role in fighting crime” is abdicating responsibility. It’s also encouraging vigilantism, a slippery slope that could only end badly. It’s not our role to fight crime, just as it is not our role to fix potholes in the road or to speed around in those bright red shiny engines putting out fires. There are people who are employed to do those things, and get paid to do them. I just have to do my own job, pay my tax bill and then all of that comes as part of the service.

Sure, if I become aware of a pending crime I should report it. If I am contemplating doing something bad, then I should stop it. And I should raise my children to know that crime is bad, honest work is good. But that’s where my role in fighting crime begins and ends. I can do no more.

It’s not like other national priorities. Tell me that I have a role to play in alleviating poverty and I can see that: I can employ people, contribute time and money to NGOs working with the poor, and so on. Tell me that I have a role to play in educating our people and I get it — I can help my domestic worker to put her daughter through college; I can help her complete her own studies.

In a small way I can help with those. But I can’t help fight crime. I can help prevent crime — by building higher walls around my house, getting vicious dogs and lining the inside of my car with high-voltage electric wire — but those measures aren’t fighting crime. They’re protecting me from criminals. The problem has not been solved — it has just been diverted to the unfortunate guys down the road who haven’t yet had the croc-infested moat dug around their property.

There’s a loveable redneck singer called Charlie Daniels who once penned the poetic lines “Now I’m not the kind of man who would harm a mouse, but if I catch somebody breakin’ in my house, I got a 12-gauge shotgun waiting on the other side”. I’m with him. I don’t have a gun of any description, but if an unarmed someone tried to break into my house and I caught him, then I’d do my best to beat the living crap out of him. If he had a gun, I would pretty much do what he told me to do. It’s called the law of averages and when they’re against you, accept it and move on.

The problem with the words of our government on the issue is that they might embolden me to do something stupid and think, “Hey — the Prez said I should fight crime, so let me take on this dude with a gun … where’s my potato peeler?” Get real.

Those urging us to “do our bit” are engaging in a wily psychological trick — getting us to believe that we’re all in this together and we must unite to fight crime. In other words, don’t apportion blame for a crime rate that makes a holiday in Hanoi in 1966 seem like a honeymoon. If there’s lots of crime, then we haven’t been pulling our weight. And we must take the blame rather than place it at the feet of those who are actually paid to take care of it. Genius piece of spin.