The year of the protest

2016 was marked by dozens of protests, with accusations of police brutality once again coming to the fore. What do researchers and the police themselves have to say about this?

- Lloyd Gedye

South Africa has seen more protests in 2016 than any other year, says University of Johannesburg (UJ) sociology professor Peter Alexander, who holds the South African Research Chair in Social Change. “The general trend has been upward since 2004.”

The country has seen labour protests, pre-election protests, service delivery protests, land protests, anti-racism protests, #FeesMustFall protests, #ZumaMustFall protests, #HlaudiMustFall protests and #PravinMustStay protests.

But while protests are increasing, finding reliable data on the topic is a challenge, says Malose Langa, a senior research associate at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR).

The academics and analysts that finweek spoke to say the annual Incident Registration Information System (Iris) data, supplied by the South African Police Service (Saps) after a Promotion of Access to Information request, is the most reliable, but it is not without its problems.

They insist that this data needs to be decoded, and some have compared it to other data sets, which they argue have led to some interesting findings.

“The data needs to be reconfigured,” says Alexander. “It needs to be looked at in more helpful ways.”

According to the Saps annual report for the 2015/16 financial year, there were 14 693 crowd-related incidents recorded in Iris and 14 740 in the 2014/15 financial year. Of the 2015/16 incidents, 24% are classified by the police as “unrest incidents”.