Monograph 97: Sector Policing. Origins And Prospects, Bill Dixon and Janine Rauch
A National Instruction on sector policing will shortly be issued by
South African Police Service National Commissioner, Jackie Selebi. This
monograph examines the new sector policing policy for South Africa and
reflects on the experience of sector policing in London. The Final Draft
of the South African Police Service’s National Instruction on Sector
Policing (2003) makes the connection between sector policing and the
philosophy of community policing very clear—sector policing is described
as a “practical manifestation” of community policing. Key elements of
sector policing are its local geographic focus, problem-solving
methodologies and community consultation.
The idea of sector policing was imported to South Africa from
abroad, probably at about the time the democratic transition took place,
and undoubtedly as a result of a South African police officer taking a
donor-funded trip abroad. The 1998 White Paper on Safety and Security
contains the first reference in an official policy document to the
concept of sector policing, defining it as a style of policing which:
entails the division of areas into smaller managerial sectors and
the assignment of police officers to these areas on a full time basis.
These police officers regularly patrol their own sector and are able to
identify problems and seek appropriate solutions. Sector policing
encourages constant contact with members of local communities.
In its gestation phase in South Africa, between 1998 and 2003, the
notion of ‘sector policing’ was interpreted and used to suit a variety
of different policy purposes, much as the term ‘community policing’ had
been during the preceding decade. The concept of sector policing
survived the internal dynamic between community-based, social crime
prevention and the highly visible search-and-seizure type policing
characterised by Operation Crackdown. In the process, however, sector
policing lost much of its meaning. It has become associated with a
diverse set of policing goals, from increased community involvement to
reduced response time to emergency calls. Sector policing is also often
referred to in relation to improved service delivery and to
modernisation and acceptance of the South African Police Service (SAPS)
in the globalising world.
Implementation of the sector policing instruction will see each SAPS
station dividing its geographic area into smaller sectors, and
dedicating staff to work intensively in those sectors. The “sector
managers” will be required to build sector-based community consultation
groups and to regularly conduct community profiling exercises in their
sectors. In South Africa, because of personnel constraints in the SAPS,
sector policing will rely heavily on Police Reservists (members of the
public who do voluntary duty to assist the police), who may be
specifically dedicated to sector policing duties, in both rural and
urban areas. This is a reflection of the fact that in its design, the
sector policing policy also had to take into account some specifically
rural challenges.
Sector policing was implemented in London in the early 1990s, and
the monograph uses a case study of sector policing in Holloway (an area
of North London) conducted between 1991 and 1993 to identify useful
lessons for South Africa. The United Kingdom (UK) research found that
sector policing had ceased to exist in London within a decade of its
implementation. The death knell was the introduction of another policing
model—borough policing—in 1999, but many problems with sector policing
had already been evident prior to that time. Key lessons for South
Africa include:
-
difficulties in establishing sectors, defining communities, and ensuring representivity in community consultations;
-
sector policing was unpopular inside the police organisation
because it challenged some of the core beliefs, values and practices in
the ‘occupational culture’ of operational police officials;
-
insufficient resources and inadequate communication from the
top of the police organisation made it unlikely that sector policing
would succeed;
-
government’s target-setting approaches (both before and after
the new Labour government came to power in 1997) attempted to generate
better arrest figures and rapid response data. Police resources became
increasingly focused on dealing with the traditional priorities of crime
fighting and incident response, rather than on the key aspects of
community policing or sector policing, which were seen as ‘soft’ and
difficult to measure.
Research into the impact of sector policing elsewhere in Britain
(outside London) also found that there was no consistent evidence of
changes in police practice as a result of sector-based problem-oriented
policing; and that the introduction of the new style of policing did not
have a marked impact on public perceptions of the police. The London
experience raises a number of questions for sector policing in South
Africa:
-
How can sector boundaries be drawn in a way that balances the
requirements of organisational and administrative efficiency,
representivity and the need to foster closer links between the police,
other key roleplayers and the public at local level?
-
Under what conditions will sector crime forums be able to act
both as a broadly representative forum for the expression of public
concerns about crime and a mechanism for co-ordinating the response to
those concerns across a range of agencies?
-
How can the police provide information about local crime and
safety problems to sector crime forums in a comprehensive yet
comprehensible and useable form? How can agreement be reached on the
priority crime and safety problems in a given area, instead of relying
on the police’s definition of the ‘real’ problems?
-
What can be done to influence the internal organisational
culture of the SAPS positively towards sector policing? How can SAPS
reward structures and performance measures be adjusted to reflect the
goals of sector policing, and to valuing collaborative problem-solving
work at least as highly as more traditional short term and
arrest-focused approaches to policing?
-
How can supervision, discipline and accountability be
maintained when police officials are delegated to work more
independently at sector level? How can control be maintained when the
sector policing model rests on such a high degree of reservist
(volunteer) participation?
How these questions and others like them are answered in practice
will determine whether sector policing will work under South African
conditions.
