Every month between 15 and 20 South African police officers lose their lives, either killed on the job, or, increasingly, through suicide. It is not unusual for policemen to be murdered for their firearms. Last month, four police officers and a civilian died in Soweto after two men armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles sprayed a section house with automatic fire before stealing their guns.
The apartheid years have left President Nelson Mandela with a less than desirable legacy. South Africa has the highest rate of alcoholism in the world, over 50 per cent illiteracy and unemployment. Car hijacking is practically a national sport, there is a rape every 11 minutes, an armed robbery every half hour, 19 people are shot dead every day and many more injured in burglaries and muggings.
And in the middle of it all are the officers of the Guateng Highway Patrol.
They keep saying that they do it for the car. That might just be true, because the pay is certainly no better than in any other police force. They carry the standard weaponry of urban warfare: a pair of R-5 assault rifles, stun grenades, CS gas, nightsticks, smoke bombs and flares. But that macho list of equipment is not, apparently, what attracts them either. What pulls them in are the BMWs.
In a slick PR move, BMW decided to lease out several hundred Three and Five series vehicles to the Highway Patrol. These are then given to officers and made their own individual responsibility. If South Africa - one of the world's most violent societies - is ever to get a handle on her rampant, murderous crime wave, it may well be the boys in the Beemers who do it.
Officers of the flying squad have what must be among the toughest policing jobs in the world. They are trained in highspeed driving and dealing with hostage crises, and they carry guns. Their beat stretches from South Africa's administrative capital, Pretoria, to its crime capital, Johannesburg.
Sergeants Nico Grebler and Leon de Lange ride together. Nico, a wiry, terrier-like moustachioed man, is on the night shift. He always kisses his wife goodbye before leaving for work as if it is the last time he'll ever see her. But she's understanding - she's a cop too. Both men know their jobs could kill them, but both would rather die than work as anything else. Officers here joke that it is not the bullet with your name on it that you have to worry about, but the one that says "To Whom It May Concern".
It is Friday night and we are cruising around Hatfield, a trendy, student-populated satellite town of Johannesburg, when the radio comes to life in an electronic squawk. Incident. The controller is speaking urgently in Afrikaans. I catch four words only: "Car hijack, Mamelodi West." "It's three black men, with a firearm or firearms. They've taken a car in one of the black suburbs," yells Nico as the sirens above our heads scream into action and we are thrown back in our seats by the vehicle's sudden acceleration from 20 miles an hour to about 90.
I have never been driven so fast through a city. Barrelling down busy streets at 120 miles an hour, crossing "red robots" (traffic lights) with other vehicles falling away to the left and right as the Five Series tears out of the city with its plentiful streetlights and wide roads. We speed into the township, with its decades of state-orchestrated indigence and its angry young men who snipe at police cars with AK47s when there is nothing good on TV.
I look up at the faces staring out as we go past. Crowds are gathering on street corners, attracted by the lights and noise. And then, as luck would have it, the helicopter runs out of fuel . . . Hot pursuit becomes tepid and the trail seems lost.
New information says the vehicle has been seen abandoned and we race towards Mamelodi's Vista University. The car is there but the criminals have left the scene - or have they? Policemen are everywhere, handguns drawn. Then two plainclothes officers from an undercover Crime Prevention Unit pull up in an unmarked Opel and jump out with R-5 machine guns at the ready.
Looking themselves uncannily like gangsters, the CPU men stalk into the maze of dilapidated houses and huts that surround the area hoping to flush the hijackers out. It is dark, and very tense. A wrong turn could result in a meeting with a bullet fired by accident. To Whom It May Concern.
The recovered car is taken back to Mamelodi's shabby police station where its temporarily grateful owner is told that she cannot have her vehicle back as they need to run forensic tests on it. The woman says she would recognise two of her assailants, but will not make a full statement. This is another legacy of apartheid: an enduring suspicion among black people towards the police. To say that community relations are poor would be an understatement.
"You see what they have here in the townships is something we call "jungle justice', " Leon explains. "The black community still don't help us at all. But if this woman is well-connected - and she seems to be - we'll find the bodies of those hijackers on a rubbish tip later in the week."
Four gunmen have attacked the Sunnyside post office and made off with 70,000 rand. But by the time we arrive, it is all over. Two men escaped, allegedly with the money, one is under arrest and another is lying at my feet. Big boys' games, big boys' rules. His 9mm pistol lies at his side; the police have removed the magazine. Prone on his back, a red sweater rucked up to the chest and several bullet wounds through the left-hand side. The police have put large plug plasters on the exit wounds.
It appears he was shot in the back trying to escape - gun in hand. In the background, a babble of Afrikaans and walkie-talkie feedback.
The policemen pull on surgical gloves and flip the corpse on to its front. "See, this is where it went in. Ja, no. Nick, get the tape measure. These must be deflections, see . . ." The official incident report went a little wobbly when transferred to the local press. The robber, whose weapon had jammed, was "shot in the shoulder and died at the scene", according to this report. In truth, he was shot in the back and through the chest.
An accident has occurred out on the highway. Glass, vehicle debris and something that looks a bit like chicken livers are scattered all around. A drunk driver was being pulled over by a police car when he lost control and ploughed his Nissan into the back of a huge low-loader truck at 100 miles an hour. The truck was going uphill and carrying a bulldozer. The car hit the back of the truck so fast and with such momentum that it sheared off the rear axle and a massive double wheel lies tellingly by the central reservation.
The passenger in the first car was killed instantly as his face rammed into the truck's steel bumper. "Have you got a strong stomach?" Leon asks me. "You wouldn't even think that was a human," says Leon as he shines his torch on to the body.
Other drivers are coming too fast and hit the road cones and flares that have been left out to channel the traffic around the crash. These unfortunates are dragged out of their vehicles by the enraged officers - a couple of whom were nearly knocked over - and forced to look at the mutilated body. "You want to see what speed does, you dumb fuck! You like driving fast now?"
The tragedy is not over yet, though. The drunk driver has emerged, as is so often the case, physically unscathed. But the dead man was his brother. As he is led off shaking in handcuffs to be charged with manslaughter and drunken driving, he must be contemplating how he has ruined everything.
This is the other side of the Highway Patrol's work - not fighting crime, just clearing up the mess left by the stupidity of others. Several drivers of the ubiquitous breakdown trucks that usually arrive at accidents before the emergency services are now arguing over who gets to salvage the blood-soaked wrecks. One of the trucks sports a bumper-sticker which reads "I'm no vulture".
"I'm sorry we had such a quiet night," says Leon as we drive home. "Maybe you should hook up with the Hillbrow squad - one of their officers was killed this evening." I say I'll think about it. But I'm no vulture either and I've seen enough carrion tonight.