INTRODUCTION

This article seeks to trace the way in which the reform of policing has developed in South Africa and to identify some of the lessons that can be learned from the problems that have arisen. In developing the argument, the article will:

explore the situation that the new government found themselves in;



identify the policy framework developed to respond to this situation;



trace the trajectory of reform and the reasons for the departure from what was intended; and



suggest lessons that might be drawn for redirecting the reform process.

APARTHEID LEGACIES

In order to appreciate the transformation of policing within South Africa, it is necessary to begin with an examination of the way in which apartheid was policed. At the heart of apartheid was a network of physical spaces that separated black people from white people. This spatial arrangement ensured that the lives and opportunities of black and white people were very different. This arrangement was maintained through laws that regulated the access black people had to areas that had been designated white, and incidentally white people's access to areas that had been designated for blacks.

Within this framework, the police acted to maintain the spatial boundaries of apartheid. Of particular importance was their role in ensuring that black access to white spaces complied with laws designed to keep blacks and whites apart while at the same time ensuring that white enterprises had access to black labour. This was accomplished through the establishment of processes of surveillance that required blacks in white areas to be able to prove that they had legal authority for being there. With respect to crime control this established a risk-based form of policing, not unlike zero tolerance policing, that operated to reduce the opportunities for crime in white areas by keeping would-be black offenders away from white victims. As blacks were poor, and whites tended to be well off by comparison, black on white crime was expected.

By paying attention to infractions of the pass laws, the police were able to reduce the number of potentially troublesome blacks in white areas. The very presence of a black person within a white area provided legal grounds for police action. Thus, this style of policing presented few of the problems of evidence that characterise conventional criminal investigations in which police seek to identify offenders after offences have occurred.

Under apartheid, the police had little interest in responding to crimes within black areas. Their presence in townships was used to anticipate and diffuse and to provide 'fireforce' responses to collective challenges to apartheid. Such interventions typically involved the targeting of police resources for short periods of time in response to resistance by blacks to white rule. These responses became particularly prominent during the 1980s when black challenges to the apartheid state became more numerous. States of emergency were declared and the military were called in on a regular basis to work with the police in the course of fireforce responses. Like the pass law policing, fireforce policing was also premised on a risk reduction logic that sought to ensure that black challenges to apartheid were identified early, were put down and that the likelihood of their future occurrence was reduced.

The policing of apartheid required the police to mobilise physical coercion in response to individual and collective challenges to white rule through the application of a risk reduction logic that sought to protect whites but had little concern for the security of black people - except as far as this facilitated the flow of labour to and from white areas. This mode of policing required skills in the mobilisation of force that were very different from those applicable within the classic Beccarian model that seeks to deter crime through the punishment of offenders.

This risk reduction mode of policing by state police was reinforced and extended through the emergence of a private security industry that provided the technology required to secure the 'gated cities', and neo-feudal domains within cities that apartheid sought to create. By the end of apartheid, there were three times as many private as public police, who operated largely in white areas and business districts in close collaboration with the public police.

In addition to commercially organised private security, the state encouraged the development of volunteer citizen policing by whites to extend and complement state policing. When the apartheid state was most strongly challenged, joint security management structures were established in most local areas to co-ordinate police and white citizen responses. A central feature of these was the development of intelligence structures in local communities that identified the emergence of organised resistance to white rule. Within this context, the police operated as part of an extensive policing network in which they supported the activities of this wider assemblage of resources.

The apartheid network for governing security served to keep blacks at a distance from whites and to apply force quickly and effectively to breaks in the dikes of apartheid whenever they occurred. What the majority of the South African police were seldom required to do, was to engage in the collection of evidence for the prosecution of offenders. While some police were trained in this Beccarian logic of deterrence though punishment, largely for application in cases of crimes committed by whites against whites, this was not the dominant mode of policing.

Within black areas, the governance of security was left to the people themselves. As recently as 1996, 74 per cent of the country's police stations were situated in white areas and those police who were located in black areas were not organised to provide security for blacks. Black South Africans responded by developing a variety of civil structures for governing their own security. Central to these in many areas were dispute resolution processes at the street and area level. These arrangements combined indigenous practices of community dispute resolution with often very violent forms of self-help intended to deter wrongdoing.

Despite the existence of these arrangements, crime was not evenly distributed between racially divided communities. As police statistics on crime in black areas are often unreliable, it is difficult to compare crime in black and white areas. Research using the post-1988 statistics has shown that, during the late 1980s, black South African's were twenty times more at risk of homicide than white South Africans. Indeed, while it was argued that crime where whites were victims was increasing significantly during this period, whites (making up ten per cent of the population) were victims of only four per cent of the recorded rapes and three per cent of the recorded murders.

The fact that South African policing was based on a wide base of civilian involvement and the mobilisation of a wide network of resources was obscured during the entire apartheid period because of the visibility of fireforce policing which came to be seen as emblematic of South African security in general. As a consequence, South Africans of all races came to view South African policing as based only on the effective use of the police and to overlook the complex network of strategies and resources, of which fireforce policing was no more than one very visible part. To most South Africans the success of white rule for so many years appeared to rest on the effectiveness of its police. This misperception was carried over into the new order where it is particularly prevalent among politicians who assume that the nationally directed police force that they inherited from the apartheid era was more powerful than was actually the case.

TRANSFORMATION STRATEGIES

With the end of apartheid came the end of most of the nodes of the policing network on which the governance of security within South Africa had been built. The pass laws were repealed, fireforce policing to respond to challenges to apartheid was no longer used, and black South Africans, with the encouragement of the new government, allowed volunteer civilian processes to fall away as they turned to the police to provide them with the same security they believed the police had provided to whites. The result has been an increasing vulnerability of whites and blacks to crime as the old South African policing network has crumbled. The effect of this has been a widespread increase in crime, particularly within historically white areas. From 1990 to 1996, most categories of crime have increased dramatically. Official statistics indicate that, during this period, serious assaults increased by 86 per cent, rape by 148 per cent, burglary by 48 per cent and theft of motor vehicles by 42 per cent. This has dramatically altered the security of whites, particularly in areas outside of the feudal-like domains secured by private security. This growing 'lawlessness' has meant that the transformation of the governance of security has been high on the political agenda of post-apartheid South Africa.

The initial response to the transformation of South African policing focused on the idea that what was required, was the legitimisation of the police so that they would be accepted by the black community. A central feature of this strategy, that remains in place, was the development of community police forums designed to provide communities with more information about and input into the operations of the police. Today, most police stations have community police forums associated with them. The hope has been that these forums will result in greater community respect for the 136 000 police personnel who are part of the new police agency. In addition, there have been a host of symbolic changes, such as the renaming of the South African Police to the South African Police Service and relabelling the Ministry of Law and Order to the Ministry of Safety and Security.

This police-focused approach to the reforming of the governance of security within South Africa soon gave way to a more careful and thorough strategy. The central document in this new approach was the National Crime Prevention Strategy (NCPS) prepared by the Ministry of Safety and Security. What was remarkable about the document was that it challenged the conventional wisdom about policing being fundamentally police business. While it did not recognise the risk-focused nature of apartheid policing, it used the international literature on policing to argue that security in the post-apartheid period should depend on a multifaceted plan that would build security networks. The document was premised on the assumption that security within post-apartheid South Africa will require the creation of a new set of apparatuses for governing security that re-established the police as one node in a network of resources.

Thus, at the heart of the NCPS was an implicit acceptance of the analysis provided above of apartheid policing. It recognised its mode of operation and called for a new assemblage of resources for governing security. The argument put forward was that, as crime had a wide variety of sources, its governance required the mobilisation of a variety of resources in response. In looking at how such a network of resources should be established, the NPCS called for a reorganisation of the governance of security around four 'pillars'.

Pillar 1 aims to reshape the police in order to enable them to operate effectively within the new network. It envisages the police as having two roles:

a risk-focused, problem-solving role in which the police are to identify and respond to the causes of crime by creating partnerships with citizens that would reduce the future likelihood of disorder - this should be done through community policing; and



the role of 'bandit catchers' who would pursue criminals who escape the preventive web.

The strategy has to establish a professional police within a liberal-democratic tradition that effectively investigates crime and assists in the prosecution of criminals. Both the features of this pillar have led the South African Police Service to look to western governments and police organisations for assistance.

Pillar 2 of the NCPS advocates a focus on community values and education as a way of increasing direct public participation in crime prevention. While it was suggested that this should involve a cross-section of groups such as churches, labour unions, teacher organisations and local community structures, the pillar is heavy on vision, but lacks detail for implementation. Pillar 3 focuses attention on environmental interventions to reduce opportunities for crime. Finally, Pillar 4 advocates a focus of resources on organised crime with a particular emphasis on improving control of the country's borders.

Together these pillars advocate the creation of a new assemblage for governing security premised on principles that are not only consistent with contemporary international wisdom on policing, but that seek to reproduce a set of structures and processes that would accomplish what the apartheid accomplished, namely, the mobilisation of a range of government and civilian resources into a functioning security network. The policing objective is very different, but the means are similar.

As the above discussion suggests, only the first of these pillars was elaborated in detail. This was relatively easy to do as there were established models to draw upon. Indeed, more recent government policy documents, such as a soon to be released White Paper on Safety and Security, have provided even further detail on how this should be done. In contrast, Pillars 2 and 3, in particular, required the creation of new institutions and practices with no clear direction on how this might be accomplished.

Despite its concern for community involvement, the implementation strategy advocated by the NCPS proposed a top-down approach in which national direction would be used to ensure reform at local level. This was easy to achieve in the context of Pillar 1 where national direction was essential to improve the systems of criminal justice. It was, however, less likely to occur with respect to Pillars 2 and 3 which required local engagement and commitment. This heavy national focus has also served to undercut the potential of the NCPS to be a vehicle for local experimentation.

At the nub of the NCPS is the argument that the governance of security is effective when it involves more than simply police resources. It argues that post-apartheid policing strategy should be developed to create new systems for mobilising resources to reduce the risk of crime across the society.

The Strategy recognised that, during apartheid, the private security industry had been developed as an important feature of the total package for providing security. While it did not comment explicitly on this, the implicit argument was that, while not a problem in itself, the unequal access to private security by whites had contributed to the inequality of access to security across racial and economic lines.

Foreign governments and the business community in South Africa endorsed the NCPS and committed themselves to work with the government in its implementation. The very structure of the document led them, like the government itself, to focus attention on Pillar 1 where direction was clearest.

As the breakdown of apartheid controls had led to an increase in crime in white areas, including business districts, there were good reasons for business to support the Strategy. But given that they and their clients often operated in relatively safe gated communities and deployed private security to engage in preventive activities, it made sense not just to support the NCPS, but in particular to support Pillar 1. An improved police would provide a back-up to private security and ensure the prosecution of those who slipped through the preventive web provided by private security. In addition, as much of the crime that threatened white people occurred because blacks now had access to public areas that had been reserved for whites, it made sense to increase and develop an effective police presence in these areas. To assist in accomplishing these aims, Business Against Crime was formed and was supported by South Africa's major companies. BAC's mission was to work with government to implement the NCPS.

BAC focus on creating a more effective and efficient police organisation within South Africa has found a very visible marker in the appointment of one of South Africa's leading business executives as the Chief Executive Officer of the South African Police Service. His mission has been to work alongside the Commissioner of the Police to introduce business management skills into the police. This appointment expresses what has become the dominant theme in policing reform within South Africa, namely, that the way to effect Pillar 1 objectives is to introduce sound management principles into the police organisation so that they can be more effective in producing their product - the effective prosecution of criminals.

A further reason for the stress on Pillar 1 has been the public outcry over high crime rates from all sectors of South African society. This has been reflected by popular demands for the police to get tough on crime. A central feature of this response to insecurity, especially among black South Africans, has been the argument that, as the police were able to secure white areas in the past, they should be able to do the same for the country as a whole. Indeed, key government officials, including the Minister of Safety and Security, have berated the police for being so effective in the past, while being so ineffective in the present. This law and order rhetoric, which has its roots in the widespread popular beliefs about the centrality of the police in protecting apartheid, while it has not resonated well with the 'get tough on the causes of crime' stance of the NCPS, has provided political support for the approach adopted by both business and foreign governments. The net result of all this has been that, despite the intention of the NCPS to shift policing reform away from the police, it has become little more than a strategy for police structural reform.

MANAGING CHANGE

The changes being implemented within the South African Police Service to make it more effective have been pursued through two principal forms of intervention:

the development of better training, in particular training that will enable the police to function more effectively as criminal investigators; and



the devolution of responsibility for fighting crime down to officers 'on the ground' so that they will be able to be more effective in responding to the public demands for better service.

The central idea is based on the well-established neo-liberal argument that local officers with local knowledge of the situation and working with local people who support them, and are willing to provide them with the knowledge they need, will enable the state to perform more effectively.

This idea of state-community partnerships to promote effective detection and prosecution that will decrease crime rates has emerged as a central feature of the thrust towards community policing noted earlier. A second complementary feature of community policing, that arises directly out of the policy agenda of the business interests represented by BAC, has been to devote more police to the protection of the conduits that middle class South Africans (and increasingly tourists) require as they move between the relatively safe havens of their gated communities. Support for this focus on 'conduit policing' has been advocated and given legitimacy by community police forums in more affluent areas.

A strategy that the business community is using to move policing in the direction of conduit policing has been to 'buy' police protection in exchange for capital investments in vehicles and buildings. Donations of vehicles and buildings are negotiated with local police in exchange for giving priority to areas of policing that business regards as important. In taking this route, businesses have been able to effectively mobilise the resources of the South African police in the way they would a private security firm. However, in these contracts they are able to buy security services that private security firms cannot offer on more favourable terms.

The irony of this is that, while community policing was intended as a programme to ensure that police reform in South Africa would not lead to a reinforcement of the Beccarian model and would shift the focus of police resources to poor areas, it has not done this. Community policing has rather become a mechanism to achieve better bandit catching, than a way of involving the police in wider strategies to enhance community involvement in crime prevention.

What this analysis suggests is that the two-tiered strategy of professionalisation and devolution reflects and is advanced by the interests and conception of the key alliance that has emerged - the increasingly strong partnership between police managers and the business community at both national, provincial and local levels. A significant feature of this alliance has been the way in which both the business and the police occupational cultures resonate with this strategy of professionalisation and devolution. Particularly attractive to both these partners is the notion that it is the people who work at the 'coalface' - station commissioners - that provide the ideal foundation on which to establish security within South Africa. From the police perspective, a significant attraction of this strategy has been that it has not required dramatic restructuring and has endorsed the idea that what the country requires is more 'real' policing done by better trained 'front-line' police officers.

A key feature of the process of centrally driven reform that simultaneously professionalises and decentralises has been the acceptance by South African politicians and the police of the Anglo-American principles of police independence. The effect of this has been that governments at all levels, and this includes the community police forums, have had very little influence on police operations. As police operations are regarded as the prerogative of the police, and the police alone, it has been police interests and understandings that have tended to predominate.

The way in which this doctrine of police independence has played itself out within South Africa has been most clearly seen at the provincial level where the Constitution limits provincial departments of safety and security to an oversight and monitoring role on the grounds that the integrity of lines of command within the police should remain intact. Instead of building better relations, the result has been growing tension and conflict between the police and provincial politicians.

An important benefit of the strategy outlined above, from the perspective of the police and the government, is that it has permitted visible reform activities to take place relatively quickly. New training has been organised and implemented, and new policy guidelines elaborating the enhanced roles of local level police managers have been set out. Both police and politicians have been able to capitalise on this by using 'process indicators' to measure success. Measures that count the numbers of people trained, of police forums established, of new policy documents, and so on, have enabled the police and the government to claim that much has occurred to reform the governance of security.

The claims by the police and the government that the reforms have been effective, are reinforced by the fact that crime rates seem to have stabilised, albeit at very high levels. This 'outcome measure' is seen as validating the claim that policing is improving, because the police have been reformed. It is hoped that what this means, is that the reform process is on track and that more of the same is to come in an attempt to see crime rates reduced.

ASSESSING TRANSFORMATION

As will already be evident from the tone of this article, we are skeptical of the transformation process and the claims that have been made for it. What has been absent is a focus on greater security for poor people that the NCPS put at the very centre of its proposals. In order to realise this aim, the discovery of preventive technologies that can be deployed and sustained in poor, black communities is required. The existing focus on encouraging the police to provide business with effective support is doing very little to facilitate this. The result is that a government strategy, designed to target inequalities in access to security, appears to be exacerbating them.

Indeed, recent research continues to suggest that race - and in South Africa its coincidence with class - is a key determinant of victimisation. Black people surveyed in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town were disproportionately victimised by both violent and property crime. In fact, the surveys suggest two interrelated conclusions. Firstly, the poor are not only almost exclusively the victims of violent crime, but also experience high levels of property crime. Secondly, the poor suffer more heavily from the effects of crime, given that they have fewer resources with which to 'cushion' themselves from the costs of victimisation.

These conclusions are reflected by research on public satisfaction with the South African Police Service. What this research shows quite unambiguously is that the majority of South Africans continue to regard the police as being unresponsive to their needs. Most black South Africans do not believe that the police are making their areas any safer than they were under apartheid. White South Africans still retain confidence in the police, although they believe they are less safe than before the transition to democracy. The same general picture is revealed by a recent analysis which indicates that the conviction rate for the South African Police Service has been declining consistently across all crime types since 1994.

The drive to establish more efficient and effective policing appears to be allowing a reversion to old practices. For example, between April and December 1997, there were more than 300 deaths in police custody. While it is difficult to assess whether this is worse than under apartheid, given the quality of the data, these figures suggest that street-level police officers may be prone to take the law into their own hands. More telling perhaps, given the high levels of crime, is the lack of public and political outcry over the issue.

Political pressure on the issue of crime has also ensured that, while the police are being asked to account for the inconsistency between process and outcome measures, they are shifting the blame for the failure of the reform process to deliver away from the process itself to the environment in which it operates. Firstly, the argument is made that, even though the police are becoming more effective investigators, the new constitutional protections have simply gone too far and are preventing them from being effective. The second argument is that the decentralisation strategy is being undermined by the lack of resources available at the station level.

Both these arguments are valid. The Constitution does make it more difficult for the police to assemble credible evidence, and the police at local levels are without adequate resources. On the last score, very little has changed. This is particularly true for police stations in black communities which continue to be chronically under-resourced. It is not uncommon, for example, to find police stations in which there may be only one vehicle for all the detectives (in some cases the ratio may be one to twenty), in which telephones are not usable, in which the two-way radio system does not work adequately, and so on.

The factual merits of these claims have lent support to the Pillar 1 focus. This means that the processes that led to the abandonment of the framework the NCPS sought to establish are unlikely to be questioned in the foreseeable future.

While increased police budgets and reduced restraints might improve such matters as conviction rates, this is likely to magnify rather than reduce policing inequalities. The essential dynamic of the reform process has been to focus attention on using police to complement protection provided to business and the well-to-do through their establishment of gated communities and the deployment of private security to protect them. What is significant about this outcome is that poor people might get better responses to crime but they will not get the risk-focused, anticipatory policing that business and the wealthy now get. Given that the poor have less ability, as already suggested, to absorb the costs of crime once it has occurred, this distinction is even more serious than it appears.

CONCLUSION

The central feature of the policing reform process in South Africa is that it has abandoned the framework established to guide it and in so doing has lost sight of the fact that a fundamental premise of reform was to reduce the insecurity of poor communities through creating local policing networks in which the police were not the centre. Policing reform designed to improve the security of the whole community has become a police reform process that has business and the middle classes as its principal focus. What lessons can be learned from this?

The importance of any general policy framework document that moves beyond clichés of reform to suggest concrete steps that can be taken, should be recognised. This is especially true if new institutions need to be created and new practices need to be discovered. This applies particularly to safety initiatives which occur outside of, although connected to police work.

It is further important to recognise that this cannot be done through a method that seeks to dictate a strategy, and it must be acknowledged that the process must be one of discovery in which experimentation plays an essential part. For this to occur, plans must be incremental and funds must be set aside to allow for experiments to take place. By definition, much of this process must develop in local communities, driven by local interests. This suggests an important role for elected local authorities and the development of innovative local strategies to ensure incentives for community crime prevention. Among others, this should include experimenting with the allocation of security (as opposed to policing) budgets to local communities, as well as the responsibility for how they are used.

Related to the above points, local knowledge must be valued as part of the policy development process if it is going to be genuinely valued. This means that procedures need to be established not simply to consult widely, but to have people from a variety of sectors play a part in shaping the experimental process and the way in which it is assessed. This requires a focus on how a national strategy such as the NCPS can initiate and guide local strategies for change.

The way in which progress towards a safer and more secure society is measured must go beyond mere indicators of internal police performance. Thus, among other things, measures must include the degree to which sustainable levels of safety are being achieved, as well as whether citizens consider this to be the case.

Finally, allowing those with money in the private sector to become exclusive partners in the process and to provide key resources, increases the risk of having the powerful shape the policy process and skew it. This is not to suggest that business does not have a role to play, but that it is only one of many players concerned with greater levels of security within South African society.

ENDNOTE

Edited version of a paper presented at a conference on the Legacies of Authoritarian Rule, University of Wisconsin, Madison, April 1998.