South African Crime Quarterly 38
Individual articles are hosted on the Academy of Science of South Africa's Open Access Journals system. To access individual articles for this edition, click here
I am pleased to be able to offer you a very full edition of SA Crime Quarterly with which to end the year. In fact, we have had to drop our regular On the Record interview feature in order to allow additional space for the articles. The articles in this edition are concerned with a range of pressing issues for South Africa and the criminal justice sector. Three contributions are based on work conducted on behalf of the African Policing Civilian Oversight Forum (APCOF) and we are pleased to have been able to partner with APCOF to bring these to SACQ readers.
The first article, by David Bruce, offers a reflection on the measurement of performance set by the SAPS. Bruce develops arguments that were initially presented in two articles carried in SACQ 31 (March 2010) in which he and Andrew Faull identified the perverse incentives created by the adoption of inappropriate indicators of police performance, and their effect on crime statistics.
Developing indicators of performance in order to assess whether government departments reach their delivery targets has become increasingly important since the passing of the Public Finance Administration Act. However, the identification of appropriate indicators and suitable measures is somewhat of an art, and for many departments it is a tremendous challenge. Identifying the wrong measures of performance can have devastating consequences. Lisa Vetten, director of the Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre to End Violence Against Women, spoke at a seminar hosted by the Crime and Justice Programme in October about how the SAPS target to reduce contact crime created a disincentive for SAPS officials to record cases of rape or sexual assault. In this article, Bruce argues that ‘the emphasis placed on… targets …carries with it substantial dangers such as that the work of government departments becomes pre-occupied with presenting a satisfactory set of numbers which may result in the production of perverse incentives, and a reduced emphasis on other factors that are important, but do not directly affect, the performance targets. In so doing performance measurement may potentially reduce police responsiveness to the actual concerns of communities.’
In their contribution, Monique Marks and Sean Tait consider the changes that have taken place over thepast ten years in policing public events. They argue that the gains that were made to democratise and improve public order policing after 1996 have been reversed, leading to an increase in human rights abuses by the police during public gatherings. They consider the context of increased demonstrations to protest against poor services, and suggest remedies for public order policing.
In African and even global terms the South African private security industry is substantial in size and enormously diverse. The private security industry has increasingly begun to play a role in policing. In their article Julie Berg and Jean-Pierre Nouveau offer some new thinking about how the regulation of the industry might be approached.
The South African government has stated its commitment to creating a new law to criminalise hate crimes. Duncan Breen was a founding leader of the Hate Crimes Working Group, and Juan Nel is the current deputy head of this group that is advocating for the criminalisation of hate crimes. In their article Nel and Breem provide an overview of the context in which the development of this legislation will take place, and make suggestions about what the law should cover. Whether a new law will in fact bring relief to the victims of hate crimes, or have an effect on the number of hate crimes perpetrated, is a matter of much international debate and deliberation. This article is the first of what I hope will be a series that considers these issues.
The Child Justice Act was an important addition to South African criminal justice legislation, in that it sought to provide the legal basis for the protection and diversion of children in conflict with the law. The Act has now been in operation for just over 12 months and the first report on the implementation of the Act was presented to Parliament in September 2011. When a costing was undertaken before the Act was passed, it was estimated that implementation would cost over R600m per annum. It should come as no surprise therefore that when only a fifth of that amount was allocated for implementation during the first year, only a fifth of children who were arrested appear to have received the services they should have. These and other matters are dealt with in the article by Lorenzo Wakefield, with which we conclude this edition of SACQ.
I wish those in the southern hemisphere a happy holiday season and look forward to the first edition of 2012, which will focus on the establishment of a new, independent anti-corruption unit to replace the Hawks.
Chandré Gould (Editor)
