Abstract
The Infrastructures of Security focuses on the management of (in)security in Johannesburg, South Africa, and results from a four-decade engagement with this city by the author. The book is, above all, an illustration of the many facets of the ‘risk society’ in highly unequal and crime-ridden societies, with fearful middle classes looking for solutions to help them manage crime-related risks. This demand for security has, in turn, generated a profitable market for private security companies, which have specialised in designing creative security solutions – at times bordering on the dystopian – that are very often predicated on the exclusion and criminalisation of the perceived dangerous ‘have-nots’.
Similar to other contexts around the world, in South Africa crime does not seem to be understood as the result of structural issues and persistent inequalities, but mostly as a ‘risk’ to be managed through (among others) multi-agency partnerships, as well as individually through situational crime-prevention techniques focused on ‘hardening’ the target (car, vulnerable body) or on manipulating the environment around the home (e.g. within the gated community). As in Europe and North America, in South Africa the state seems to have succeeded in ‘responsibilising’ its citizens and non-state organisations, which have all taken an active role in the prevention of crime. Echoing developments in Europe and North America over the governance of urban space, moreover, public spaces in Johannesburg have been strictly regulated and cleansed of the ‘difference’ through incivility ordinances and zero-tolerance policing. But there is more to the case of Johannesburg, as Murray cogently illustrates: city space is also governed through, among others, checkpoints, drones, sophisticated CCTV cameras and spectacular police raids in crime ‘hot-spots’ by both public law enforcement agencies and private security companies.
Private security companies have indeed been crucial to the creation and maintenance of the technologies and infrastructures of security in Johannesburg: they have tapped into the deep and persistent sense of ‘endangerment’ (p. xxii) felt by the anxious middle classes and have devised creative security solutions for them. For example, to help the ‘haves’ armour their ‘defenceless’ body, private companies have commercialised wearable (at times even fashionable) security outfits and items with embedded global positioning systems (GPS) trackers and self-defence tools such as panic buttons, hand-dispensed pepper spray canisters and handheld flame-throwers.
Private companies have also produced a security arsenal to help the wealthy defend their private property, such as their cars and home. For example, to defend private vehicles from carjacking – for many, the symbol of the country's crime plague (p. 74) – security companies have devised gadgets that make cars somehow resemble the Batmobile (Batman's famous car), among other fantasy vehicles. Similar to the Batmobile, cars can be endowed with features such as a flame-throwing or pepper spray device, and systems that either electrocute or unleash sharpened steel blades against potential attackers. Cars are also installed with up-to-date satellite tracking that allows their tracking by private companies, with the latter also offering helicopter-assisted GPS, and air and ground recovery teams in crime hot-spots. In addition to the car, security companies (hired by neighbourhood associations) have devised surveillance-based solutions for the fortress-home, making access to and circulation in enclaves increasingly difficult for potential offenders.
Chapter 5 is without a doubt the central chapter of the book. It is here that the most interesting actuarial and pre-emptive ‘infrastructures of security’ materialise in their full dystopian extent and reach. In the chapter, Murray outlines the way in which a private company, Vumacam, managed to install sophisticated smart CCTV cameras all around Johannesburg (as well as other cities), in both private and public spaces, mainly without proper consultation and relevant authorisation, hence trumping people's right to privacy in the interest of profit. Such cameras have come to form a ‘network of CCTV networks’ (p. 200) through which private companies can track suspicious vehicles, among others. Most importantly, Vumacam offers private security companies the possibility of analysing the recorded, stored data through super-smart, video-analytic software programmed to evaluate an individual's behaviour and detect suspicious persons who look ‘out of place’ (the software self-learns through trial and error). Once something out-of-the-ordinary is detected by this software, for example through facial recognition or licence plate scanning, the system alerts private security companies’ control rooms where operators can check the alert and eventually dispatch armed response units on the ground. Real-time warning messages can also be sent to wealthy individuals via WhatsApp.
Murray's book explains all these securitisation strategies very well – from those aimed at armouring the vulnerable body and protecting the fortress-home and car, to those reliant on blanket surveillance of the city space. However, the reader is left wondering why this has happened in the South African context in particular. In other words, what is it in Johannesburg (as well as in other South African cities mentioned in the book) that facilitated the development of these ‘security infrastructures’, and why this has not happened in the same way in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, or by any means in other global cities with high crime rates, stark inequalities and fearful middle classes? The book would have probably benefitted from some comparative insights, which could have helped emphasise even further the key factors that led to the development of ‘infrastructures of security’ in Johannesburg.
The book ends with two very interesting epilogues, giving account of a number of art installations encouraging people to think critically about existing security systems and their genealogies, and fostering people's imagination around alternatives to the status quo. The second epilogue, written by Carla Busuttil and Gary Charles, focuses on the art installation titled Mosquito Lightning. Mosquito Lightning is the name of a fictional company that the two artists used to ridicule the present-day fixation with private policing in South Africa. Curiously, the fictitious company's name was seemingly selected by the artists regardless of its resonance to the so-called ‘Mosquito device’ – a high-frequency noise device produced and sold by private companies to push some unwanted people (such as loitering young people and the homeless) away from consumption-focused public or semi-public spaces. Use of the term ‘Mosquito’ for both the fictitious security company and the noise device is an interesting coincidence, perhaps showing the insect's symbolic power in the area of security. As Busuttil and Charles put it (p. 272), indeed, ‘the mosquito is small and seemingly innocuous, yet it poses a greater risk to human lives than all […] large animals combined’. Similar to the flying insect, security devices can be small in size and largely ignored, yet they can easily trump an individual's rights and discriminatorily target only the unwanted ‘have-nots’. This is why critical analyses of security systems are crucial and compelling, making Murray's book an important contribution to scholarship.