Jonny Steinberg > Quotes

“Difficult times do not produce gentility, as if there is an angle hovering over the world of the oppressed.”
― Jonny Steinberg, Thin Blue: The Unwritten Rules of Policing South African

“Constable N stepped away from the car, into the darkness where Darren could not see where his gun was pointing, and fired two rounds into the air. The gunshots cracked the roof of the night sky and echoed back at us. My first thought was that they could be heard all over Toekomsrus; I wondered how many imaginations had in that instant conjured a different story to explain the gunshots; a record of all those stories, I found myself thinking, would probably document every fear this place has of itself and its young men.”
― Jonny Steinberg, Thin Blue: The Unwritten Rules of Policing South African

“A populace that has given its consent to be policed accepts, save for those rare and atypical moments when there is a genuine threat to the integrity of the underlying order, that in civil life, the police are uniquely entitled to use force, that when they arrive on the scene, everyone else relinquishes the entitlement to use force against them.”
― Jonny Steinberg, Thin Blue: The Unwritten Rules of Policing South African

“The way she taught me, although I grew up an orphan, I still feel that what she was I am today. I did not lose her despite her death. I am not sure that words can describe what I am trying to tell you. I mean that by the time I was seven, she had already made me.”
― Jonny Steinberg, A Man of Good Hope

“end,”
― Jonny Steinberg, One Day in Bethlehem

“There are not so many murders in this township, I think to myself, and not so few policemen, that a killing should be treated like an old woman who has lost her cat.”
― Jonny Steinberg, Thin Blue: The Unwritten Rules of Policing South African

“The police and the vulnerable are natural allies. That they are so is counterintuitive and strange, for they also loathe one another.”
― Jonny Steinberg, Thin Blue: The Unwritten Rules of Policing South African

“About a year ago, an entire suburb in this man’s jurisdiction turned from the police and erected a substitute agency. To all intents and purposes, several thousand people here have severed their relationship with the South African Police Service. He appears not to have noticed.”
― Jonny Steinberg, Thin Blue: The Unwritten Rules of Policing South African

“Most of the men thrown into the back of the van that night were drunk, but none was in public: each was in his own home. And yet not one of them questioned the legality of his arrest. After nearly a dace of democracy, each assumed that the cops had every right to drag him out of his home and throw him in prison.”
― Jonny Steinberg, Thin Blue: The Unwritten Rules of Policing South African