‘We get sucked into everybody’s mess’: Protests and Public Order Policing in South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Based on interviews with 43 serving members at four Public Order Police units, this article highlights the perspectives of officers involved in arguably the most contentious and visible aspect of South African policing. As the primary arm of the police responsible for crowd management, Public Order members are at the coalface of a country inundated with protests. Respondents describe an environment in which they are forced to contend with politicians’ negligence and incitement of protest, the vagaries of mediation and the hostility of many protestors, all while they often share the frustrations of the crowds they are required to manage. Examining these representations provides critical insight into how these police, who are a central component of the civil strife afflicting South Africa, interpret the challenges of the job. Public Order Police are an integral element in protests but not just as the strong arm of the state suppressing dissent. Rather, they fulfil multiple functions in an intricate protest landscape over which they exercise limited control.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".