Safe, safer, safest

So, the commission of inquiry into policing in Khayelitsha got the constitutional green-light last week. This makes me happy, but it is by no means a panacea to the reality of risk that simmers between Mew Way and Baden-Powell Drive. A step in the right direction sure, but given the current levels of crime, there isn't a hell of a lot that wouldn't be. Anyway, it's got me musing about safety, and what it means to be safe.

A few years ago, I spent a some months studying in a small university town in the American Midwest. There were a lot of things in that town that perplexed me (that's a story for another time), but the one thing that really got me upside down, was that I could walk alone from the library to my dorm in the student hours of the morning, when it was all dark and misty and quiet except for drunken feet stomping home from the Green Street bars. I could walk and it was safe. Totally. Not the kind of safe I persuade myself I am when I speedwalk home down Lower Main Road by my lonesome at night. A legitimate safe. No turning your head around safe, no giving the shifty eye to someone walking in in front of you, behind you, near you safe... Just you and the road and your backpack and laptop and your iPod jamming your end-of-the-evening choons safe.

I don't feel unsafe often. Especially not during the day. The light offers an invincibility that disappears only as the sun does. I walk under roads and on bridges, I walk in places that smell of pee and stale clothes. I walk past squashed cigarettes that are so well smoked their filters look singed. I walk past people who stand and say nothing, I walk past people who stand and stare. I walk around bruised mattresses and I walk through people's homes; bowing my head as I try to avoid the artifacts of their lives that decorate the pavements, doorways and parking lots that bring my commute to into their domestic space. Sometimes I walk through Golden Acre after rush-hour when only the BagIt is still open and the "TEN RAND FISH AND CHIPS" shout of the woman at the escalator rolls and rolls around the empty space and it's just me and a few other people and I try to imagine what the space looked like an hour or two ago. 

The last time I felt a little uncomfortable was walking around Lower Woodstock in the early evening a few weeks ago, and the last time I felt really legitimately unsafe was probably the moment a few years ago when I got mugged walking to work by a kid with a super-shiny knife bigger than his face. Otherwise there's just the regular unsafe you feel when you realize ah, I should probably be vigilant at this juncture in my life and you take out your ear buds, quicken your step, and try to mozey into the well-lit patches of the street. 

But what makes you safe, really? While there's a semantic difference sure, between being safe and feeling safe-- the latter based on everything from your experiences to how lucky you feel that day, and the former possibly more objectively defined--I don't know that that's how it works in reality. I think it's possible to be both statistically safe and fearful, and that if that fear creeps into and compromises someone's quality of life and embeds itself in their understanding of the world, then it's probably difficult to say that that person is "safe". Safe means means safe. It means no harm, no discomfort.

The point that I'm taking my sweet time to make, is just that even if the police in Khayelitsha sort their ish out and even if incidences of crime decrease, that doesn't mean that the residents of Khayelitsha are safe. Until the comforting privilege that comes from having no visceral concern for your wellbeing settles into the homes that stand between Mew Way and Baden-Powell Drive, I don't think anyone can in good conscience conclude that Khayelitsha is safe. My concern is a preemptive one, sure, and hopefully it's one that will be wasted. Hopefully the commission of inquiry won't just look at policing, it will look at what it means to be safe. Hopefully.