Former Western Cape detective head, Jeremy Vearey, has more than 25 years’ experience serving in the South African Police Service (SAPS) — a career that has seen him confronting gangsters and investigating fellow police officers. 

His latest memoir, Into Dark Water: A Police Memoir, had its virtual launch on Thursday. Vearey discussed the book in a webinar hosted by Daily Maverick associate editor Marianne Thamm. 

While his previous award-winning memoir, Jeremy Vannie Elsies, tells the tale of the author’s life, Into Dark Water presents a wide-angle portrait of policing, politics and criminality in the Western Cape, informed by Vearey’s personal experiences as a cop. 

“I think my approach and need to write this book comes partly from the tumultuous experiences inside the organisation that I’ve been in the headlines for, for the past 25 years — which are related to contradictions within the police between the old and the new,” said Vearey. 

He said he saw his experiences within SAPS as a way to highlight “not only the shadows within the organisation, but also the shadows within [himself]”.

Vearey’s deeply personal approach to writing was influenced by the work of his mentor, author Anne Schuster, whose writing classes he attended on weekends. He was one of only two men who attended Schuster’s workshops. 

Schuster saw the process of “life-writing” as one which differed from that of writing a biography or memoir, said Vearey. Instead, she viewed it as an exercise “where you gather parts of your lost self together, re-remember the past and reconstruct a self”, he said. 

Through her non-traditional approach, “she looked for the balance in an experience that both produced her and reproduced her”, said Vearey.

In Into Dark Water, Vearey delves into his past experiences in a way that is not clouded by hindsight or reflection, but which presents a reconstructed image of how he “felt and thought at the time”. 

In sharing his experiences within a fraught organisation, Vearey said he tried to steer clear of judgmental statements about fellow police officers. Instead, he attempted to explain the actions of people, not only from his own point of view, but one informed by the experiences of others. 

“I tried to do that as accurately as possible so that there was a wider point of view than just what I saw,” he said. 

“But I did not hold back on things.” 

In the book, there are stories of ruthless gangsters and criminals, brutal murders and corruption, as Vearey traces his beginnings as a school teacher in the 1980s to his deep-rooted history within the ANC, to his integration into South Africa’s first democratic police service. 

In the SAPS, Vearey advocated for “people-centred” service, which he still believes is possible. 

“I think it can be… we have the right policies and legislation to make things work,” he said. But it depends on a “middle-layer leadership”, said Vearey, whose community policing ethos is strong and no longer theoretical, but “has gone through to the practice of working at a station and working with communities”. 

However, these police officers are not currently the voices that inform police strategy, which falls largely on academics and “people who have not been in the support services environment of the police”, said Vearey. 

The voices of academics and those with little to no experience on the job “talk abstract into strategy”, he said. “And hence strategy does not have any practical implementation plan.”

The voices of officers with a strong people-centred ethos need to be collectively organised to implement this in strategy, said Vearey. DM

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