08 Dec 2006: ISS Today: Fight Crime, Africa Tells South Africa
According to Brendan Boyle the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) recently submitted a report to the South African government substantially different from South Africa’s own self-assessment submitted in June this year. The APRM lists what it sees as the15 key threats to the stability of South Africa’s democracy. Among these are the high levels of violent crime and crimes against women and children, but also unemployment, poverty and the ‘immense’ gap between rich and poor. Finally, the APRM report ‘urges’ the South African government to make the fight against crime its ‘top priority’.
The irony is that as far back as 1994, South Africa had already, in the White Paper on Intelligence, identified crime – along with issues of economic collapse, overpopulation, and mass-migration – as the main threat to its national security. This position was confirmed in 1996 with the approval of the White Paper on Defence and again in 1999 with the tabling of the White Paper on South African Participation in International Peace Missions. The White Paper on Defence, for example, makes it clear that the biggest threat to the South African people is: “… socio-economic problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, the lack of housing and the absence of adequate social services, as well as the high level of crime and violence”.
The obvious question is that if we already knew for more than a decade that crime and socio-economic conditions, very often precisely the sort of conditions that cause or are conducive to crime and violence, are our ‘top priorities’, what have we done about it? The truth is that there have indeed been a number of noteworthy attempts at addressing these issues, but almost all of them have lapsed into dormancy. In this regard, good strategies such as the National Growth and Development Strategy (GDS) and the National Crime Prevention Strategy (NCPS) of 1996 come to mind. As for the NCPS, among the main reasons for its failure was the absence of dedicated funding and an authoritative coordinating structure to lead and direct its implementation.
Simultaneous with the initial implementation of the NCPS in 1996, the pressures of crime and violence required something that would deliver a more immediate and visible impact. This resulted in a number of high-density police crime combating operations and eventually to the National Crime Combating Strategy (NCCS) in 2000 and its Operation Crackdown. These operations were impressive in terms of their scale and operational results, and for a while satisfied many people who had called for something to be done about crime. But, inherent in this apparent success lies its failure, because policing will always reach a stage where it can no longer make a meaningful impact on crime. An obvious reason is that although dedicated police work and high density operations may limit the space for organised crime and can act as a deterrent for some crime, it has no impact on the socio-economic and other conditions that lie at the root of crime.
The initial successes of the police operations approach have since created an over-reliance on the criminal justice sector as the solution to our crime problem. However, there are indications of a growing realisation that we need much more than the police and the criminal justice system to fight crime effectively. It is necessary merely to consider the well-known ‘broken-windows’ theory against the backdrop of general lawlessness, disorder, urban neglect and decay, and moral degeneration, along with all the other socio-economic factors already mentioned, to understand how huge and complex our crime problem really is.
The good news is that ‘broken windows’ can be fixed, but we need an equally complex but well coordinated approach to do it. What we have at the moment is a disjointed effort by many groups and organisations, albeit well-meaning, in addition to government’s criminal justice departments. For example, groups such as Business Against Crime (BAC), the religious leaders, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the Commission for Human Rights, and even media groups and many others are in one way or the other attempting to make a contribution to the fight against crime.
What we really need, to begin with, is for government to provide us with the following:
- a national crime combating policy to tell us what to do;
- a national strategy telling us how to do it;
- sub- or departmental strategies directing each government department in terms of its responsibilities allocated by the national policy and strategy (it literally includes all government departments and not just the police and other criminal justice departments);
- a coordinating structure (National Crime Combating Centre?) with the legal authority to direct government departments, including ministers and directors-general, in terms of their respective sub-strategies and to hold them accountable; and
- the integration of nongovernmental initiatives with the above coordinating structure.
Dr Johan Burger, Crime and Justice Programme, ISS Tshwane (Pretoria)
