The ZARP was the mounted and foot police of the ZAR, a nation that was mainly rural with a strong frontier spirit as the Boers had only arrived in the Transvaal less than 50 years before during the Great Trek.
Johannesburg was a highly multicultural city, being made up of people from all over the world, and as such greatly resented by the Boers, who feared becoming more of a minority in their own country.
The Boers regarded Johannesburg with its bars, brothels and gambling houses as the "new Babylon" that had unfortunately emerged on the highveld, a place of vice and immorality that needed to be brought under control.
[9] To provide a means of controlling of the new city that had emerged on the highveld, the ZAR government created the ZARPs in September 1886 with a German immigrant, Karl Frederich von Brandis, being appointed the first police commissioner.
[10] In July 1887, Brandis reported to Pretoria that owing to the unregulated state of the brothels of Johannesburg that syphilis was reaching epidemic status, leading to him to ask for permission to intern the "sick whores" as he called them in a medical facility before more were infected.
[22] Other laws passed by the volksraad stated that the Chinese were not permitted to walk on pavements or footpaths; were not allowed to ride public carriages; were excluded from the first and second class section of the railroad passenger cars; and were forbidden to have possess or consume alcohol.
[21] In October 1897, the volksraad banned all Asians from the Johannesburg central marketplace, claiming that they spread infectious diseases that threatened the health of the white residents.
[23] A Johannesburg newspaper that supported the government of President Paul Kruger complained in 1898 about the "indiscriminate reckless firing by foolish young constables".
[23] The ZARPs were recruited from the poorest elements of the urban Transvaal Boer society who needed to feel superior to blacks, and were much given to whippings and shootings.
[25] Fiddes, speaking on behalf of Milner told them that however much they approved of discrimination against the Indians that this was a useful way to spark diplomatic friction between the Transvaal and Britain that might lead to a war.
[24] Fraser warned Jan Smuts, the attorney-general of the ZAR, that "England would not longer accept the maladministration and especially about the ill-treatment of her subjects which was worse here that elsewhere.
[27] Shortly afterwards, in January 1899, a British Uitlander named Thomas Edgar was shot dead by a ZARP while resisting arrest inside of his Johannesburg house, an incident that attracted immense media attention in Britain, where the British press portrayed the shooting as a case of the cold-blooded murder of an innocent Englishman killed in front of his wife.
[28] Edgar, a boilermaker from Bootle, Lancashire had settled in Johannesburg, attracted by the high wages that made it possible for him to enjoy a standard of living four times higher than was possible in Britain.
[29] When the ZARPs kicked in the door of Edgar's house to arrest him, he tried to strike one with an iron rod, leading for Constable Barend Jones to shoot him dead.
[28] Protests began in the uitlander community and a petition was presented to the British vice-consul in Johannesburg, demanding that Britain intervene to end what they called the systematic oppression by the ZARPs.
In a book written in 1899 to justify Canada's involvement in the Boer war, the Canadian author Emerson Bristol Biggar wrote: "Drunken ZARPs (policemen) swagger about brandishing revolvers, occasionally shooting down poor natives for a trifle, and insulting Uitlanders (who are not allowed to carry arms), whenever an excuse offers.
Leo Amery stated that “the police were first-class fighters, combining the skill of the Boer with the courage and self-sacrifice of the disciplined soldier”.