Summary

Through all the bitter decades of apartheid, the South African police brutally invaded the everyday lives of ordinary citizens, displaying absolute contempt for human rights. In this book, a respected policing scholar traces the evolution of the specialized Public Order police unit-formerly the Internal Stability Division and the Riot Unit-that was designed to spearhead the apartheid assault. The author takes the reader intimately and directly into the daily routines of the same unit in the astonishing years of South Africa's political rebirth. This account observes policing in the uneven course of its transformation toward guarding and fostering a humane constitutional idealism in the new democracy. The question underlying this account is whether the police can really change. Transforming Robocops examines the obstacles to police change and suggests ways of effecting change within police organizations. The author brings to this remarkable narrative both a wide-ranging scholarly grasp of contemporary developments in global and South African policing and her own gritty recollections of field operations.