The police break up the group of homeless children apparently without trying to find their families or otherwise aid them, which shows that the police’s job in apartheid South African society is to control Black people, not help them. Here the reader learns that Tsotsi rejected “sympathy,” which he has only recently rediscovered in the novel’s present timeline, due to his separation from his mother, his ensuing homelessness, and the gang life that homelessness introduced him to. The novel seems to be suggesting, then, that oppression and cruelty can destroy sympathy and breed hatred.