Monograph 11: Towards Safer Cities: The South African Debate on Options for Urban Safety, Edited by Mark Shaw
The debate
on options for city policing and crime prevention in South Africa have
gathered pace since 1994. The Institute for Security Studies – believing
that the key to crime prevention lies at local level – has concentrated
on developing workable solutions to growing levels of crime in South
Africa`s urban centres. The contents of this monograph constitute a
collection of policy documents, in the formulation of which the
Institute has been active, and covering key issues in the debate. These
are as follows:
- the concept document on metropolitan and municipal policing produced for the Gauteng Ministry of Safety and Security;
- a
study of the possibilities for establishing city policing services in
Gauteng completed for the Standing Committee on Safety and Security of
the Gauteng Legislature;
- a discussion document on the possibility of establishing a Safer Cities and Towns Programme for South Africa; and
- draft
legislation produced by the South African Police Service on
metropolitan and municipal policing. The draft legislation is likely to
change considerably in the future and much debate is still required on
its contents.
The
documents represent the degree to which the debate has swung from one
which concentrates purely on the establishment of metropolitan and
municipal policing to a realisation that achieving safer cities and
towns requires a focus on a range of local government focus areas. There
is much for South African cities to learn from the experiences of
municipal initiatives elsewhere. The key lesson is that city and town
authorities have an important responsibility in regard to crime
prevention and can play a critical co-ordinating role. Indeed,
international experience of crime prevention suggests that the active
participation of local authorities in steering crime prevention projects
is a critical factor in their success.
The debate on local involvement in policing and crime prevention
has some way to progress and is increasingly difficult to separate (as
has been the tendency to date) from more general issues relating to the
transformation of the SAPS. It would be unfortunate, for example, if
current developments around the decentralisation of policing functions
in the SAPS were not co-ordinated with developments in the city policing
and crime prevention debate. Also, there is much to be said for
investigating the linking of democratically elected local authorities
with local SAPS commanders to improve levels of accountability at local
level. Finally, national guidelines on issues such as environmental
design for crime prevention are urgently required at local government
level.
While the monograph does not aim to specifically raise these
issues, it provides a useful background to an understanding of the roots
of the debate on local authority participation in crime prevention. As
has been emphasised above, the debate is far from over. While it has, to
some extent, developed in an ad hoc manner (concentrating
initially too heavily on metropolitan and municipal policing) there is
now a critical need to cite further developments more firmly within
government policy initiatives such as the National Crime Prevention
Strategy. The debate around safer cities and towns must not be seen as
an add-on to current initiatives – it is in fact the key to local
delivery.
