Monograph 12: Policing the Transformation: Further Issues in South Africa`s Crime Debate, Edited by Mark Shaw, Lala Camerer, Duxita Mi

As the South African political transition has unfolded, the issue of crime has become one of the key challenges facing the new government. Public and political pressure on this issue has built up steadily since 1994. Initial impressions that the new ANC government lacked the political will to deal with crime have been replaced by a growing scepticism about the capabilities of the South African Police Service (SAPS). This has been reinforced by a growing tendency among those politically responsible for safety and security, at both national and provincial level, to criticise the SAPS in public.

This growing divide between the SAPS and its political masters emerged clearly from the recent dispute between the minister of safety and security, Sydney Mufamadi, and the national commissioner of the SAPS, George Fivaz. The dispute has had serious consequences. Public confidence in the police has been further eroded, and the morale of police officials lowered. Most seriously, though, it has created the impression that the tensions are caused purely by friction between personalities, and are unrelated to the policing framework in which they operate.

Ironically, informed debates around crime and policing have waned rather than developed in the post-apartheid environment. Universities should assume some of the responsibility for this. Academic institutions have, with few exceptions, not adequately confronted the issue of crime in their research programmes. While foreign experts regard the country as a criminological laboratory, local researchers have largely failed to respond to the challenge. Those who have tried (and this is also true of researchers at the Institute for Security Studies) are often restricted – given the urgency of the issues, and the nature of the demands around them – by limited capacity. Also, given the fact that research on this issue is so thinly spread, there is little healthy debate in which analytical ideas and proposed solutions are subjected to critical review. All too often, ideas are accepted simply because they are the only ones available.

The ISS Crime and Policing Policy Project contributes to the debate around possible solutions to crime by regularly publishing working papers on the issue. Thus the papers in this monograph are aimed at providing a broad overview of the debate to date, and making some suggestions for appropriate policy interventions. They present ongoing work at the institute, as well as analyses by two outside researchers. The contributions include:

There is still a great deal of work to do. The Crime and Policing Policy Project has concentrated on making short- to medium-term policy interventions, and has succeeded in engaging a range of policy-makers and the public. However, given the long lead time required for publishing ore rigorous research, there is a need to initiate sustained research projects on criminal justice issues, and to better equip our graduates with the skills needed for innovative criminological research.