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The Globalisation of
Democratic Policing: Bill Dixon[i] Published by The Institute of
Criminology, University of Cape Town. (Occasional Paper Series).
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Introduction ‘Globalization is an idea whose time has come.’ With this short but striking sentence, four British academics (Held et al, 1999: 1) begin what the blurb on the cover tells us is ‘the definitive work’ on a spectre haunting not just Europe but the world. Yet, as they go on to remark, it is a spectre that remains at once pervasive and elusive – a cliché that signifies much but often tells us little about the contemporary human condition. The purpose of this study is to make a contribution to furthering our understanding of globalisation by looking at the spread of distinctive Anglo-American models of ‘community policing’ to one of the newest members of the international family of democratic nations, South Africa. Although based in part on a series of interviews and discussions with leading practitioners in policing in the Western Cape, this study is conceptual and analytical rather than evaluative.[ii] It aims to use this empirical material to illustrate how programmes of sector and zero tolerance policing developed in the mature democracies of the North/West are interpreted, adapted and implemented in the context of a country such as South Africa with a very recent history of authoritarian policing. GlobalisationWhether it is an idea whose time has come, a cliché or, as Zygmunt Bauman (1998: 1) would have it, a fad word for ‘the intractable fate of the world’, the usefulness of the term ‘globalisation’ depends on its explanatory power. And if we do not know what ‘globalisation’ itself is supposed to mean, it can explain nothing. So, let us begin with the definition put forward by David Held and his colleagues (1999: 16) in the book referred to in the opening paragraph: Globalization can be thought of as a process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions – assessed in terms of their extensity, intensity, velocity and impact - generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction, and the exercise of power. This definition suggests, firstly, that globalisation is about institutional and organisational change in the form of the movement or ‘flow’ of ‘symbols, tokens and information across space and time’; and secondly, as Held et al (1999: 17) go on to explain, that the pattern of globalisation can be analysed across four ‘spatio-temporal dimensions’:
But this definitional spadework is only a small part of Held et al’s contribution to the debate on globalisation. For they also distinguish three broad schools of thought within that debate, each of which offers a quite different account of the nature and origins of the processes at work in ‘the widening, deepening and speeding up of global interconnectedness’ (Held et al, 1999: 2).[iii] The globalisation debateMembers of the first of these schools of thought – the hyperglobalisers – argue that the emergence of a single global market has led to the effacement of the nation-state and the creation of new forms of social organisation and global governance. Although they tend to emphasise the economic impetus behind globalisation, the hyperglobalisers also make much of the immanence of a worldwide civilisation based on the principles of liberal democracy. To them, globalisation represents a transformation of the very ‘framework of human action’ (Albrow quoted in Held et al, 1999: 5). In response to this, sceptics argue – again largely from an economic perspective – that current levels of global integration are by no means unprecedented. Nor do they accept that what they prefer to see as a process of ‘internationalisation’ signals the terminal decline of the nation-state. On the contrary, they believe that global economic integration and liberalisation are driven by national governments and rely on the continuing strength of nation-states to promote and regulate cross-border economic activity. Compared with the certainties of the hyperglobalisers and sceptics, the transformationalist position is both more subtle and open to the dynamic, unpredictable nature of contemporary globalisation and its consequences. They are convinced that globalisation is leading to rapid and historically unprecedented economic, social and political change. Whole societies and the world order are being reshaped, but transformationalists make no judgements about what the outcome of that process may be. Instead of seeing globalisation as leading, almost inevitably, to the creation of a particular kind of global market or form of global civilisation, they stress the contingent nature of change and the importance, over the long-term, of conjunctural factors. As far as the significance of the nation-state is concerned, transformationalists argue that its powers, functions and authority are not necessarily being diminished or augmented as other analysts imply, but ‘re-engineered’. Confronted with the immense economic power of global corporations and the growth of global mechanisms of political governance such as the United Nations, ‘the form and functions of the state are having to adapt as governments seek coherent strategies of engaging with a globalizing world’ (Held, et al, 1999: 9). Features of globalisationBefore going on to consider globalisation in the context of policing more directly, three points that emerge from the debate need to be given extra emphasis in view of their particular relevance to this study. The first of these is that, as transformationalists such as David Held and his collaborators maintain, globalisation is a multi-faceted phenomenon whose effects are felt in all areas of human activity – social and political as well as economic, financial, cultural and environmental. What is especially notable about contemporary globalization … is the confluence of globalizing tendencies within all the key domains of social interaction. (Held et al, 1999: 437) What follows here is therefore an attempt to look more closely at how models of police organisation and styles of policing become globalised in much the same way as financial instruments or production techniques in manufacturing. The second point is that, though they may remain the principal actors within the global political order (Giddens, 1990: 71), relationships between the governments of nation-states are no longer the only vehicle for the transmission of ideas about modes and techniques of governance such as policing. Thus, the aim of this study is to extend recent work on government to government assistance in the field of policing, criminal justice and crime prevention by examining the way in which programmes developed in north America and Europe affect the rhetoric and practice of policing on the southernmost tip of Africa (Van der Spuy, 1997; Van der Spuy et al, 1998). Anthony Giddens (1990: 64) captures the third and last feature of globalisation that merits attention here when he writes that: "Globalisation can … be defined as the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa. This is a dialectical process because such local happenings may move in an obverse direction from the very distanciated relations that shape them. Local transformation is as much a part of globalisation as the lateral extension of social connections across time and space." (Emphasis in original.) In other words, globalisation is as much about the local effects of change as it as about the fact that the source of change is so distant. And what is more, the direction of change at any given location cannot simply be read off once its source is known and understood. Global change may have unexpected and contradictory local effects. Indeed, as Bauman (1998: 2) observes, the ‘uses of time and space are sharply differentiated as well as differentiating’ for ‘globalization divides as much as it unites’. What is experienced as liberating by some ‘descends as an uninviting and cruel fate on others’.[iv] Once again this study takes up these points by examining how programmes of sector policing and the language of zero tolerance originating in Britain and the United States have been adopted and adapted for use in South Africa, and to what effect. The globalisation of democratic policingWhatever the long term effects of globalisation may be on the nation-state, there is no doubt that in the half century since 1945 it has emerged as the dominant mode of political rule around the world (Held, et al, 1999: 46). During this time, the modern nation-state has also acquired a particular political form as liberal or representative democracy has spread across the globe in what Huntington (1991) describes as two ‘waves’ (and one ‘reverse wave’) of democratisation.[v] Liberal democracy has thus become globalised as the political form par excellence of modern nation-states defined as: [P]olitical apparatuses, distinct from both ruler and ruled, with supreme jurisdiction over a demarcated territorial area, backed by a claim to a monopoly of coercive power, and enjoying legitimacy as a result of a minimum level of support or loyalty from their citizens. (Held, et al, 1999: 45) [vi] Ever since the American scholar Egon Bittner (1974; 1975) produced his now classic treatises on the police it has become commonplace to argue – following on from this classical Weberian definition of the state - that: Police are institutions or individuals given the general right to use coercive force by the state within the state’s domestic territory. (Klockars, 1985: 2) According to Bittner and Klockars it is thus the (public or state) police who act as the principal franchisees of the liberal democratic state’s claim to a monopoly on the use of coercive force. [vii] And – as one might expect – along with the globalisation of liberal democracy has come the globalisation of particularly ‘democratic’ styles of policing and forms of police governance and organisation. ‘A foreign policy for democratic policing’One of the best known analyses of the globalisation of ‘democratic policing’ as an explicit goal of foreign policy is contained in an article by the well travelled American academic, David Bayley (1995). [viii] Setting himself the task of assessing how the old democracies of the West can assist the development of ‘the institutions and habits of democracy’ in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Bayley (1995: 79) alights on the police as an institution critical to the ‘success of democratic nation-building’. Empowered to ‘regulate the freedoms that are essential to democracy’, he quite rightly argues that the ‘clandestine surveillance’ of the police ‘can “chill” the impulse to participate in politics’. Yet, despite the centrality of police reform to the institutionalisation of democracy, Bayley (1995: 80-1) goes on to note the reluctance of the US government to assist in changing the character, rather than merely enhancing the capacity, of foreign police agencies. [ix] This failure to see the political wood for the technical trees is, he believes, both myopic and irresponsible, and he devotes the remainder of his article to demonstrating what international experience suggests can ‘reasonably be achieved through the lever of police foreign-policy’ (Bayley, 1995: 82).[x] The various options for reform that he (Bayley, 1995: 82-9) canvasses range from the unrealistic and pointless (the creation of multiple independent police organisations subject to the control of more than one level of government) through the desirable but hard to accomplish (the redirection of police priorities from aggregated, and state-mandated, security functions to meeting the disaggregated needs of individual citizens) and the promising but uncertain (achieving fundamental change in the behaviour and mind-sets of police personnel) to the realistic and attainable goal of increasing a foreign police organisation’s technical capacity to carry out the work assigned to it. Having reviewed the scope for foreign policy initiatives in democratic policing, Bayley (1995: 89) comes to the uncomfortable conclusion that there is an inverse relationship between the ease with which change can be accomplished and the qualitative effect of that change on the character of government and the police. Building the technical capacity of police in crowd control techniques or criminal investigation is relatively straightforward but of only marginal significance in the democratisation of policing. Conversely, responsiveness to disaggregated public needs, respect for human rights and management that is transparent, participative and reflective are critical to ‘democratic nation-building’ but much more difficult to achieve. Faced with this ‘Hobson’s choice’, Bayley (1995: 90-2) recommends that the police foreign policies of the mature democracies should be informed by eleven guiding principles. Of these principles, the third is perhaps the most startling – and the most relevant here - because, as Bayley readily admits, it runs counter to the trend towards community or problem-oriented policing evident across many jurisdictions in the North/West. It reads as follows: [D]eveloped democratic governments should encourage foreign police to concentrate on reactive law enforcement. (Bayley, 1995: 90) Bayley’s (1995: 91) reason for advocating a principle so out of tune with what has become the conventional wisdom of progressive police agencies throughout the English-speaking world and beyond is instructive. [xi] This laudable and progressive philosophy of [community] policing … would be dangerous if applied uncritically in countries whose ideas of prevention have involved the covert penetration of neighbourhoods, the presumptive labelling of deviants, the commandeering of grassroots help, and a preoccupation with collective rather than individual security concerns. In the absence of well-established democratic government and public confidence in police committed to public service the over-hasty introduction of community policing may do no more than ‘camoflage the continuation of state-mandated crime-prevention through co-optation’. ‘A new colonialism’Among the strands of historical experience Bayley (1995: 81) refers to as a precedent for the development of a contemporary foreign policy for policing are the links formed under conditions of ‘colonial hegemony’ between the metropolitan police systems of Britain, France and Japan and those of the peripheral nations of the South. [xii] This point is taken up with added vigour – and in a more explicitly South African context - in the work of Mike Brogden and Clifford Shearing (1993: 95) who argue that acceptable models of liberal democratic policing are – or, perhaps more accurately, were – marketed to the new democracies that emerged in the early 1990s as one of many commodities in an ‘international technological supermarket’. For them, policing strategies, like any other product, are promoted in the South and the East as the outcome of extensive and reliable ‘research and development’ in the industrialised North/West – ‘a ‘loss leader’ that will facilitate future exports by establishing ‘cultural links”. Put crudely, the globalisation of democratic policing represents a ‘new form of colonialism’ whereby metropolitan technologies are foisted on Eastern Europe and Southern Africa at a time of ‘conjunctural crisis’, and Britain is cast in a familiar role in the vanguard of late twentieth century police imperialism: In the United Kingdom … a reshuffling of the priorities of overseas aid has made the instructional establishment of police reforms a priority. From Pretoria to Palestine to St Petersburg, British missions, like those of several other European countries, are heavily engaged in the transformation of state police work. (Brogden, 1996: 225) Democratic policing in the new South AfricaEvidence of the impact of the foreign police policies of the northern/western democracies, and of a new colonialism in the marketing of metropolitan policing technologies, is not hard to find in the history of post-1990 South Africa (Van der Spuy, 1997; Van der Spuy et al, 1998; Brogden, 1996; Brogden and Shearing, 1993). Yet, even at the high level of generality at which the ‘foreign policy’ and ‘new colonialism’ accounts of globalisation operate, the infusion of South African state policing with Anglo-American programmes of liberal-democratic policing has been incremental and remains incomplete. But before anything else can be said about how the globalisation of democratic policing has affected South Africa, let us be clear about what is meant by ‘democratic policing’ and the forms it has taken over the last 10 years. Community policing – doing it the western way[xiii] Notwithstanding Bayley’s (1995: 91) words of warning about the dangers of exporting proactive models of policing to countries lacking the democratic history needed to sustain them, it is precisely those styles of community and problem oriented policing that have been promoted as blueprints for democratic policing not only in South Africa but across the sub-continent south of the Sahara, in eastern Europe and in the countries of the former Soviet Union (Van der Spuy, 1997; Van der Spuy et al, 1998; Brogden, 1996). How this came to happen in South Africa will be taken up in a moment. But, by way of introduction, we need to consider what doing community policing the western way actually implies.[xiv] The most striking thing about Anglo-American ‘community policing’ is that those two words are capable of meaning so many things to so many people (Green and Mastrofski, 1988: xiii). To one British critic ‘community policing’ is little more than a ‘brand name’ that, like Spar, ‘gives a common identity to a diverse range of independent concerns (Smith, 1987: 54). For some it is a new philosophy of policing (Trojanowicz and Bucqueroux, 1990: 7), for others no more than ‘a contrapuntal theme: harmony for the old melody’ (Manning, 1988: 28). It is also remarkable for its political malleability, capable of being ‘spun’ to appeal to liberals and conservatives alike (Crank, 1994), or rationalised with otherwise sharply divergent strategies of crime control (Stenson, 1993).[xv] None of this has prevented a few hardy souls from attempting to synthesise the disparate themes, elements or models of community policing into a coherent philosophy and/or organisational strategy. [xvi] The usefulness of even attempting to give shape to a concept that remains so stubbornly amorphous is open to question. [xvii] However, for present purposes at least, David Bayley (1994) provides a reasonably concise and relatively uncontentious statement of what is meant by ‘community policing’. Using data collected in five countries – Australia, Canada, Japan, the UK and the US - concludes that four elements recur wherever police agencies ‘make a determined effort to change their traditional practices in an effort to prevent crime’ (Bayley, 1994: 105). Collectively tagged with the acronym CAMPS, they are:
Apart from capturing what few could disagree are some of the most significant and frequently encountered features of community policing, the CAMPS formulation also makes it very clear that the (i.e. state or public) police are central to the enterprise. Though communities are expected to inform the police about how they can help in meeting their security needs, the duty to consult is placed on the police. It is the police organisation that must be flattened to allow local commanders (not the community) to take decisions. It is the police who must mobilise the public and the private sector. And – whatever the mobilised cohorts of civil society may do – the police have a critical role in the amelioration of conditions that lead to crime and insecurity. Thus, as Brogden and Shearing (1993) suggest, doing democratic/community policing the western way leaves the state and its police in control of the definition and maintenance of order and the solution of communal problems. The question is: how did this approach to the democratisation of policing become entrenched as conventional wisdom in South Africa, a country with so long a tradition of popular justice and informal ordering? Community policing in South Africa – a critical history [xviii] In the beginning, back in the still dark days of the 1980s, ‘community policing’ in South Africa was a contested notion – and represented a sharply divergent set of practices (Schärf, 1989: 208-9). On the one hand there was policing in the white middle-class suburbs as a partnership against crime with friendly ‘bobbies-on-the-beat’ working alongside ‘active citizens’ organised in neighbourhood watches. Elsewhere – often literally - on the other side of the tracks, there existed a range of more or less autonomous popular initiatives aimed at ordering communities and undertaking policing activities either in support of, or opposition to, the apartheid regime. In the first of these parallel worlds ‘community policing’ might have seemed much as it was in similar enclaves of responsibility and respectability across North America, Britain and Australasia. But in the second world – a world of covert operations, ‘sub-contractors’, and ‘blind-eyes’ – community policing was about penetrating communities and co-opting them in the unending struggle to maintain minority rule. But in places it was also about building non-state mechanisms of ordering that could be seen as ‘pre-figuring the culture of a post-apartheid democratic social control structure’ (Schärf, 1989: 230). In neither world would a critical observer from the North/West have seen much in the way of liberal democratic policing. But it was to the ‘counter-hegemonic’ project of ‘community-initiated ordering’ in the townships rather than the extension of suburban, state-centred community policing that critics like Schärf (1989: 232) looked for the future of democratic policing in South Africa. Transition As the authoritarian 1980s gave way to the democratic 1990s, the future of South African policing was uncertain. Commentators such as Brogden and Shearing (1993: 175) continued to argue for policing to be firmly rooted in the institutions of civil society. They called for the role of the state police in the core tasks of problem-solving and peace-keeping to be limited and ‘organised around their capacity as bearers of force’. [xix] Meanwhile, an ad hoc working party of academics, researchers and activists from non-governmental organisations was wrestling with community policing in the context of what they called ‘the formal policing agency’ (Marais, 1992: 8). [xx] In addition to its local complement of eight, the group included three international members and its report is testament to the effort it put into the task of ‘South Africanising’ the perspectives provided by their North American colleagues.[xxi] Although it took great care to acknowledge the continued importance of self-initiated policing by communities without the involvement of the formal police agency, the group’s principal purpose was obvious: the adaptation of a recognisably Anglo-American model of state police-centred community policing for use in the extraordinary conditions of South Africa in transition. In fact, the group was so taken with the idea of international co-operation that they made special reference to the contribution foreign police agencies and experts could make to the development of community policing in the concluding section of their report (Marais, 1992: 38-9). The interim Constitution adopted in 1993 provided for a network of community police forums to be established at police station level. [xxii] Amongst other things, these bodies were intended to promote accountability and co-operation between the community and the (state) police. [xxiii] Then in 1994 the Minister of Safety and Security in South Africa’s first democratic government published a draft policy document on policing which called for communities to be ‘empowered to engage meaningfully with local police about their problems and priorities’ in accordance with the vision of community consultation enunciated in the interim Constitution (Minister of Safety and Security, 1994: 12). In a section on police organisation, the document went on to state that the ‘philosophy of community policing must inform and pervade the entire organisation’ (Minister of Safety and Security, 1994: 21-2). For their part, police officials must become ‘adaptable area specialists’ with a knowledge of their environment and an ability to tackle the problems that arise in it. During this final phase of South Africa’s transition to democracy the die was not yet cast in favour of police-centred community policing. The colonisation of the state by those who had struggled for so long against minority rule was incomplete and the draft policy urged that: We must find points of convergence between the formal and informal systems of justice. Local police commanders must interact with, and accommodate informal policing systems, where they add to the general problem-solving capacity of the community. (Minister of Safety and Security, 1994: 14). A new dispensation As South Africa settled under what is still tediously referred to as ‘the new dispensation’, the government of national unity (GNU) moved quickly to create a unified South African Police Service (SAPS), and to put in place some of the institutional mechanisms deemed necessary to secure its legitimacy in the eyes of a sceptical public. Only 18 months after the country’s first democratic elections, a new South African Police Service Act (68 of 1995) received presidential assent. In accordance with the 1993 Constitution, chapter 7 of the Act made detailed provision for community consultation to take place in community police forums (CPFs) and area and provincial boards. This was followed by the publication of the National Crime Prevention Strategy in May 1996 (Department for Safety and Security, 1996). Aimed at establishing a comprehensive policy framework for government action on crime, the NCPS sought to maximise the participation of civil society in mobilising and sustaining crime prevention initiatives. In a piece of legislation designed to lay the statutory foundations of a new, unified SAPS, the omission of any reference to autonomous, non-state systems of ordering may be unremarkable. And, in so far as ‘the community’ is given a role in policing by the 1995 Act, it is restricted to working in partnership with the state police on the joint identification and solution of local problems.[xxiv] More surprising perhaps is the approach to the participation of civil society in crime prevention evident in pillar 3 of the NCPS. Instead of acknowledging the existence of alternative ordering systems and encouraging co-operation between them and the state system as the draft policy document of 1994 had done, the stated aim of pillar 3 is to promote popular participation in the formal criminal justice system by means of a programme of public education. For all the talk of partnership and the need for more resources than the formal justice system alone can provide (Simpson and Rauch, 1999: 298), the relationship between informal and formal justice systems, between the state and civil society and (by implication) between policing by the community and policing in it is clearly skewed in favour of the state, its agents and institutions.[xxv] Whereas Brogden and Shearing (1993: 175) saw the coercive powers of the state police as an occasional support for civil policing, the NCPS consigns the public and the institutions of civil society to being modest contributors to a crime prevention programme drawn up and driven by government.[xxvi] Though work on popular justice, self-regulation and community-centred community policing continued into the mid 1990s, by 1996 South Africa’s commitment to doing democratic policing the western way was growing apace.[xxvii] While the NCPS looked forward to the mobilisation of civil society in tackling crime and supporting the state’s attempts to get to its social and economic roots, the government moved to implement other key elements of the CAMPS approach to crime prevention through community policing. Though its results were often difficult to judge, community consultation – the first element of CAMPS – became institutionalised, as CPFs mushroomed across the country (Mistry, 1997; Oppler, 1997).[xxviii] Steps were also taken to adapt the state police organisation by devolving authority down to provincial and local commanders in the form of a special study on the decentralisation of policing functions commissioned by the Department of Safety and Security.[xxix] Making CAMPS in South Africa If the trend towards Anglo-American state police-centred community policing needed any further official endorsement it was provided in early 1997 with the publication by the Department of Safety and Security of a manual for the SAPS entitled Community Policing: Policy Framework and Draft Guidelines. With whole chapters devoted to ‘problem orientated policing’ and the establishment of community police forums, and replete with references to (and wholesale borrowings from) the work of leading North American writers and practitioners such as Robert Trojanowicz, Herman Goldstein and Lee Brown, the manual represents the consummation of South Africa’s love affair with the globalised model of liberal democratic policing encapsulated by CAMPS.[xxx] The enthusiasm with which the relationship had been pursued is evident in a summary of ‘five key factors’ in the development of community policing, the first three of which are headlined - in an uncanny echo of Bayley’s formulation - ‘consultation’, ‘adaptation’ and ‘mobilization’ (Department of Safety and Security, 1997: 11).[xxxi] Equally unambiguous in its acceptance of the controlling interest of the state and its police in community policing is this description of why community policing is ‘smart policing’: Because: Days of the ScorpionIf South Africa’s first post-apartheid government saw democratisation as the key to the legitimation of state policing, its second seems likely to prioritise police effectiveness as its principal goal in the field of safety and security. This sea change in government’s attitude towards the police is signalled in the 1998 White Paper on Safety and Security which states - in a section on institutional reform of the ‘structures of safety and security at national level’ - that: The current context in which policing policy is made differs from that in 1994. The police [SAPS] need to be viewed as trusted vehicles of law enforcement in the new democracy. The focus of accountability is now primarily to ensure effective service delivery to the public and must be shaped to reflect those in other democracies. (Department of Safety and Security, 1998: 24). Ritual obeisance is paid in the White Paper to the principles of community participation in, and democratic control of, policing embodied in the philosophy of community policing and the 1993 Constitution respectively. [xxxii] But the justification for a continued commitment to ‘the participation of communities and community policing’ is new for together, we are told, they ‘form the bedrock of effective law enforcement’ (Department of Safety and Security, 1998: 5). And, as the White Paper makes abundantly clear, it is ‘effective law enforcement’ that constitutes the main function of the police. In effect, its publication marks the unbundling of what are described as the two ‘broad and interlocking components’ of safety and security: ‘policing or law enforcement’ and ‘crime prevention … aimed at undercutting the causes of crime’ (Department of Safety and Security, 1998: 6).[xxxiii] In doing so, the White Paper deals with operational strategies associated with community policing in a somewhat summary fashion under the heading ‘active visible policing’, itself only one of three ‘focus areas’ for ‘law enforcement in a democracy’.[xxxiv] It may be premature to argue that the White Paper’s endorsement of reactive law enforcement of the kind recommended by Bayley (1995: 90) represents the relegation of community policing to the status of constitutional window-dressing. But the advent of a bullish new Minister of Safety and Security after the 1999 election certainly gives pause for thought.[xxxv] Widely reported as wanting the police to ‘deal with crime the way a bulldog deals with a bone’, Minister Tshwete has moved swiftly to establish an elite unit – to be known, much to the delight of newspaper headline writers, as the ‘Scorpions’ - of police officials, prosecutors and intelligence agents to tackle violent and commercial crime and other priorities such as police corruption.[xxxvi] At the same news briefing as he announced detailed plans for the ‘Scorpions’, Minister Tshwete said that measures would also be taken to increase the capacity of CPFs to mobilise citizens against crime and improve co-operation between the public and law enforcement agencies. It remains to be seen whether constitutional commitments to basic human rights, let alone the tenets of community policing, can long survive ministerial pronouncements to the effect that … ours is a very difficult transitional situation, which is being fully exploited by the beastly elements in our midst, with the full knowledge that, in certain practical circumstances, we have our hands tied.[xxxvii] But this is to run ahead of this study’s main concern with the adaptation and implementation of globalised Anglo-American styles of ‘democratic’ community policing under South African conditions. It is to this to which we now turn. Models of community policing The status of the two models of globalised Anglo-American democratic or community policing considered in this study is very different. On the one hand, the 1998 White Paper on Safety and Security recommends sector policing as an approach to the implementation of ‘effective visible policing’ (Department of Safety and Security, 1998: 17-8). In line with this, the SAPS has made the development of a Service policy on sector policing an operational objective for the year 1999/2000.[xxxviii] Zero tolerance, on other hand, has never received such authoritative official endorsement though the White Paper does call for directed patrol and sector policing to be ‘proactively, vigorously and fairly conducted’. The two models also provide contrasting visions of community policing. While sector policing is broadly liberal (Crank, 1994) or social democratic/imperialist (Stenson, 1993) in conception, zero tolerance falls squarely within the conservative realist (Stenson) or simply conservative (Crank) tradition. What they represent therefore is two sharply contrasting organisational and operational strategies within the dominant ideology of Anglo-American democratic policing. The purpose of this section is, firstly, to look at the origins of the two models in the North/West, and what is known about them in their original British and American forms, and then, secondly, to put their implementation in the Western Cape into a wider South African context. Sector policing‘Sector policing’ seems to have been one of the few innovations in community policing that the British can even partially claim as their own. Although its earliest obvious antecedents lie in the experiments in ‘team policing’ conducted in several American cities in the early 1970s, the idea that small groups of police officials should take responsibility for meeting as many of the policing needs of a particular area as possible can be traced back into the previous decade and the introduction of the ‘unit beat’ system of motorised patrol in the United Kingdom (Sherman et al, 1973; Weatheritt, 1986).[xxxix] Team policing itself fizzled out at the height of what proponents of community policing call the ‘professional era’ of policing in the US (Sparrow et al, 1990). But this did not stop several British police forces from initiating a series of patrol experiments based on the assumption that ‘geographically responsible’ police officers would be in more regular contact with the people they served and therefore better informed about their problems and priorities (Weatheritt, 1986). These trials culminated in neighbourhood policing; one of the most ambitious and carefully evaluated innovations in policing ever attempted in the UK. Implemented in six police areas in and around London, neighbourhood policing was subjected to rigorous scrutiny by internal (Turner, 1986) and external evaluators (Irving et al, 1989). As with team policing, the results of the experiment were mixed. But, once again, the two police forces involved were not discouraged and one of them, Surrey Constabulary, moved almost immediately to implement a form of neighbourhood policing (known as total geographic policing or TGP) across their whole force area south and west of London. In the other force, the Metropolitan Police, change to a recognisably area-based system of policing took a little longer and it was not until 1990 that ‘sector policing’ was finally adopted as the standard pattern for the operational deployment of front-line personnel by Britain’s largest police organisation. PrinciplesAlthough the new style of policing was clearly based on the permanent allocation of small teams of officers to specific geographical areas, it also incorporated other key elements of the CAMPS philosophy including community consultation and problem solving. The principal aim of sector policing in London was therefore to decentralise the delivery of police ‘services’ by redeploying all uniformed personnel on to small teams responsible for policing demarcated ‘sectors’ within each of the Metropolitan Police’s existing police areas.[xl] Its main principles can be summarised as being to:
Giving practical effect to these principles in the typical inner London police division studied by Dixon and Stanko (1993) lead to the identification of three sectors.[xli] Six teams of five or six officers were then allocated to each of these small areas under the overall command of two ‘sector inspectors’.[xlii] A new five shift rota was devised to ensure that, in addition to covering the traditional ‘early’ (6.00 am to 2.00 pm) ‘late’ (2.00 pm to 10.00 pm) and ‘night’ (10.00 pm to 6.00 am) shifts, teams were also available to provide extra resources at times of peak demand on Friday and Saturday evenings.[xliii] Since its inception in London in 1992-3, versions of sector policing have been introduced by several other British police forces. However in spite, or perhaps because, of its popularity with senior police managers, it has proved difficult to implement in its strongest area-based form (Dixon and Stanko, 1993; 1995; Bennett and Kemp, 1994; Dixon, 1999). Doubts also remain about the extent to which those elements of sector policing that have been introduced in London and elsewhere have contributed to making good police commitments to effectiveness, problem solving, visibility, accessibility, service delivery and consensual policing. Sector policing in South AfricaThe 1998 White Paper describes sector policing as entailing: … the division of areas into smaller managerial sectors and 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. (Department of Safety and Security, 1998: 17) Although this probably represents the most detailed and fulsome endorsement of sector policing in South Africa to date, it was by no means the first time that it had been officially commended as a useful approach to the development of state-centred community policing. It has already been noted that, as early as 1994, the then Minister of Safety and Security’s draft policy document talked of community police officers with an intimate knowledge of a particular area and its problems as the main operational units of a lean and efficient police organisation.[xliv] Two years later ‘sector policing’ itself made an appearance in the NCPS as an operational strategy aimed at maximising police deployment in areas affected by ‘inter-group conflict’. Thus it is against a background of consistent if cautious official support for the idea of area-based community policing that the main focus of this study, Project Ithemba, was initiated in Nyanga in 1996. Zero tolerancePerhaps the most remarkable thing about ‘zero tolerance policing’ is the near impossibility of finding anyone but politicians, journalists and international policing consultants-cum-salesmen prepared to admit to using the expression. Rarer still are the working police official who claims to be doing zero tolerance policing and the scholar who confesses to recommending it. Like homosexuality in 1950s Britain – or contemporary Zimbabwe – zero tolerance seems to be a love that dare not speak its name. Consequently, tracing its origins is not a task to be undertaken lightly. Broken windowsBut if it begins anywhere the trail must start with the publication in 1982 of Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety by two American scholars, James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling.[xlv] This short article has become something of a sacred text among proponents of a generation of ‘order maintenance’ policing strategies (Schapiro, 1997). Wilson and Kelling’s theory is based on the relatively uncontroversial proposition that many citizens feel unsafe in public places not just because they fear ‘real’ crime but because they are frightened of being bothered by people who may not be either violent or ‘criminal’ but are merely disorderly, disreputable, obstreperous or unpredictable.[xlvi] They go on to suggest – and this is where the ‘broken windows’ come in – that there is often an inextricable link between disorder and crime at the community level. In fact, they argue, a developmental sequence exists: ‘if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken’.[xlvii] For Wilson and Kelling, ‘[t]he unchecked panhandler is, in effect, the first broken window’ and ‘serious street crime flourishes in areas in which disorderly behaviour goes unchecked’. The question is, of course, what are the police to do to about this? Wilson and Kelling’s answer is that the ‘essence of the police role in maintaining order is to reinforce the informal control mechanisms of the community itself’. And to do this, the police must resist the ‘not-so-commendable’ utilitarian instinct to ‘define deviancy down’ (as US senator Daniel Moynihan has famously put it) by decriminalising disreputable behaviour that ‘harms no one’.[xlviii] Arresting a lone drunk or vagrant may seem, even be, unjust yet, Wilson and Kelling argue, ‘failing to do anything about a score of drunks or a hundred vagrants may destroy an entire community’ by leaving it vulnerable to ‘criminal invasion’. There are several points that need to be made about the ‘broken window’ thesis and its connection with ‘zero tolerance’. The first is that the phrase ‘zero tolerance’ is notable only by its absence in Wilson and Kelling’s original article. The second is that - however uncomfortably the evident conservatism of the authors may sit with the liberal or social democratic orthodoxies of other versions of community policing - their emphasis on the role of the police in reinforcing the ‘natural forces’ of communal self-control, together with their forceful advocacy of the foot patrol officer familiar with his territory and its population (both ‘rough’ and ‘respectable’) as the central figure in achieving that goal, makes it hard to deny that ‘broken windows’ is part of that same tradition.[xlix] Jock Young (1999) makes the third point with typical asperity in a recent critique of what he calls the ‘criminology of intolerance’. Taking Wilson and Kelling’s insistence that the police should concentrate their order maintenance efforts on neighbourhoods at the point of tipping into disorder as an example of ‘discretion bordering on realpolitik’, he argues that ‘broken windows’ is … scarcely a programme of zero tolerance against all crime which believes that the police are the key actors in the creation of orderly society and which views the ‘sweeping up’ of the streets as producing miraculous and immediate results. (Young, 1999: 128)[l] On the contrary Young (1999: 127) contends that the ‘broken windows’ theorists – and James Q. Wilson in particular – concede that the police can have ‘only a limited purchase on the problem of crime’ and cannot solve it by using traditional ‘no holds barred’ law enforcement tactics. A close reading of the ‘broken windows’ thesis thus reveals that talk of ‘zero tolerance policing’ – if it serves any purpose at all – relates to no more than a small part of a sophisticated criminological position. At most, Wilson and Kelling can be credited or condemned for calling on the police to assert themselves and, if necessary, take enforcement action against the apparently ‘harmless’ behaviour – public drunkenness, begging, street prostitution and low-level drug dealing – that, if it is allowed to go unchallenged, may send neighbourhoods at the ‘tipping point’ spiralling into lawlessness. New York, New YorkWilson and Kelling may be the godfathers of zero tolerance, but paternity is generally attributed to the former Commissioner of the New York Police Department, William J. Bratton. Bratton has certainly admitted to reading Broken Windows while he was still police chief in Boston (Young, 1999: 126). But he also claims to have become converted to its underlying philosophy some time before he came across the article itself. In any event, the policies that he implemented during his relatively short tenure (from January 1994 to April 1996) as Commissioner in New York amount – like the strategy advocated by Wilson and Kelling – to much more than the ‘zero tolerance’ label suggests. Much of what he did to ‘re-engineer’ the department by giving local precinct commanders greater control over personnel and their assignment, and holding them rigorously accountable for their performance in meeting crime reduction targets, owes more to modern business management theory than any operational strategy. Though he insisted that precincts placed ‘dual emphasis on quality-of-life or signs of crime as well as on serious crime' and encouraged ordinary patrol officers to seek out drug arrests during peak dealing hours, he also made extensive use of computer-generated statistics to identify crime ‘hot spots’ and involved local managers much more closely in the investigation of police corruption (Bratton, 1998: 36; 35-40). In summarising his approach he refers to the ‘three Ps’ of community policing - partnership, problem solving and prevention - and claims that, properly applied they are ‘tougher on crime than anything else we’ve ever tried’ (Bratton, 1998: 32).[li] Far from living up to his popular image as the man who swept New York clear of street people and squeegee merchants, Bratton (1998: 43) has gone so far as to disclaim any association with the rhetoric of ‘zero tolerance’: … [it] is neither a phrase that I use nor one that captures the meaning of what happened in New York City, either in the subways or on the streets.[lii] For those who hanker after zero tolerance as a panacea for crime and urban decay Bratton’s (1998: 42-3) views make disturbing reading. He concedes that the phrase conveys a ‘powerful message about the importance of civility and order’ and the need for police to restore and maintain them. But he also warns that it sends other, less welcome messages too. It ‘smacks of over-zealousness’, and exaggerates how much the police can be expected to do in eradicating complex social problems like under-age drinking, prostitution, and aggressive begging. Using zero tolerance as a slogan ‘belies the complexity of police work’. The idea, which some unthinking police administrators have put forward, that ‘Tomorrow we will adopt a zero tolerance or “broken windows” philosophy’ and follow it up with a few general orders, dooms order maintenance. […] Improperly and unthinkingly done … order maintenance has considerable potential for trouble, especially in the form of improper, discriminatory or abusive policing. (Bratton, 1998: 43) Zero tolerance in the UKWith the possible exception of journalists, politicians have been the most enthusiastic users of the ‘zero tolerance’ slogan. New York’s Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani who appointed Bratton as the city’s police commissioner was the first to bask in the reflected glory of a reduction in crime attributed to order maintenance policing, but others such as Britain’s Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw and Ireland’s Prime Minister Bertie Ahern have been quick to push forward for their place in the sun (Shapiro, 1997). Strange though it may seem for a country with such an enviable, if not always deserved, reputation for consensual policing to fall prey to a policy that elevates intolerance to a point of principle, it is in Britain that the phrase ‘zero tolerance’ has gained the widest currency (Bratton, 1998: 42). One explanation for this is the enthusiasm with which the (then opposition) Labour Party took up the idea in the run up to the 1997 general election. In what appears to have been a successful attempt to shake off a reputation for being ‘soft’ on law and order (Downes and Morgan, 1997), Labour went in to the election shouting its Leader Tony Blair’s now internationally famous soundbyte ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’ to the rooftops. [liii] Its manifesto contained a strongly worded section on ‘disorder’ condemning ‘the unacceptable level of anti-social behaviour and crime on our streets’ and promising that the Party’s ‘zero tolerance approach’ would address the problem of petty criminality among young people (Labour Party, 1997: 23). With the election safely won, the incoming Home Secretary, Jack Straw, took the opportunity of his party’s annual conference in September 1997 to announce that he wanted ‘zero tolerance of crime and disorder in our neighbourhoods’ (quoted in Young, 1999: 123). Britain’s police professionals have been considerably more parsimonious in their use of zero tolerance rhetoric than the country’s politicians. The most famous exponent of ‘broken windows/New York’ tactics has been a man named Ray Mallon. Dubbed ‘the disciple of Bratton’ by the press, Mallon made a name for himself as crime manager in the industrial town of Hartlepool in the north-east of England (Gibbons, 1996). Like Bratton, Mallon claims that his decision to “get intimate’ with anti-social behaviour and yobs’ resulted in a dramatic reduction in reported crime and an equally marked boost to police morale (Gibbons, 1996: 20; Dennis and Mallon, 1998).[liv] Yet for all his lionisation by the media and the unabashed populism of his views on everything from ‘traditional’ English working class values to sentencing policy, Mallon prefers to describe the style of policing he adopted in Hartlepool as ‘confident policing’ rather than ‘zero tolerance’ (Dennis and Mallon, 1998).[lv] Though he aimed to regain control of the streets ‘by simply paying attention to, not ignoring, anti-social behaviour and ‘nuisance crime”, this was done ‘in the British tradition of give-and-take’ (Dennis and Mallon, 1998: 66).[lvi] But, again like Bratton in New York, Mallon’s project extended some way beyond street policing to encompass the ‘targeting’ of persistent offenders and the motivation of personnel using techniques derived from sports management. [lvii] The zero tolerance debateDebate about the merits of sector policing has been relatively muted and restricted to the professional and/or academic arena (Dixon and Stanko, 1993; 1995; Bennett and Kemp, 1995; Dixon, 1999). Elements of the programme – especially those relating to problem solving – have proved difficult to implement and serious doubts have been expressed about its impact on relations between police and public at local level. Such objections pale into insignificance beside the controversy that has raged over zero tolerance. The first area of dispute is whether anything identifiable as ‘zero tolerance policing’ has ever been attempted. It has already been argued that none of the administrators and scholars associated with ‘broken windows’, ‘order maintenance’, ‘New York style’ or ‘confident’ policing discussed here have sought to associate themselves with a strong version of ‘zero tolerance’. [lviii] Far from recommending or carrying out a policy whereby the drunk, disorderly and troublesome are routinely arrested and subjected to the full rigours of the criminal justice process as a literal reading of the phrase – and its use by politicians and the press - might suggest, Wilson, Kelling, Bratton and Mallon are all at pains – with varying degrees of vehemence – to assert the need for tolerance, the careful targeting of police interventions and the judicious use of discretion. Nor are their policies limited to taking a firm (but not, they maintain, intolerant) line on fear-inducing ‘incivilities’, for they also advocate – again with different amounts of emphasis – far-reaching changes in the management of police organisations and the use of a range of techniques for identifying and dealing with repeat offenders and particularly crime-prone areas. This leads on to another source of controversy – the extent to which ‘order maintenance’ policing strategies (to use possibly the least ideologically loaded term on offer) have succeeded in reducing crime, fear and insecurity. Bold claims are routinely made by its proponents and there can scarcely be a newspaper in the English-speaking world that has not attributed New York’s ‘plummeting’ crime rates (down by 37% between 1994 and 1997) and homicide (down by over 50%) to William Bratton’s policies as Commissioner of the City’s Police Department.[lix] Unfortunately, as Jock Young (1999: 124-6) has demonstrated, the rough coincidence between Bratton’s tenure and falling crime is not sufficient to prove any causal connection between the two events. The managerial and other changes instituted by Bratton and his predecessor, Lee Brown – who, even on Bratton’s (1998: 34) account, took the critical step of hiring 7,000 additional police officers - make it impossible to attribute any crime reduction effects resulting from the latter’s policies to ‘order maintenance’ policing alone. What is more, crime also fell in 17 of 25 of the largest US conurbations between 1993 and 1996 including cities such as San Diego, where vastly different policies of problem-oriented ‘neighbourhood policing’ were implemented (Pollard, 1998), and Oakland where no significant change in strategy occurred at all (Young, 1999).[lx] The final focus of disagreement about ‘order maintenance’ is one that has particular resonance in a new democracy like South Africa. In its mildest form, the objection is that: That part of the ‘Zero Tolerance’ principle characterised by aggressive policing, confrontational management, opportunistic short-termism and undue emphasis on ‘the numbers game’ poses an enormous threat to the future. If this culture is not tackled, then – on the basis of the British experience – the risk of serious corruption and inner-city disorder in the future is real. (Pollard, 1998: 61)[lxi] Pollard’s argument is simple. It is that the short-term fix for complex social problems offered by ‘New York style’ policing risks jeopardising the trust and confidence of the public on which all democratic policing ultimately depends by encouraging aggression and rule-bending by officers striving to meet crime reduction targets using tough ‘order maintenance’ tactics. Other observers such as Shapiro (1997: 1-2) go further. He claims that the implementation of the Bratton/Giuliani policy led to a 41% increase in civilian complaints of excessive force against the police, and the inflation of the sum paid in compensation to victims of police brutality in New York City from US$13.5 million in 1992 to US$24 million four years later. [lxii] Experience in cities like Houston and Pittsburgh where similar policies have been pursued mirror New York’s and lead Shapiro (1997: 2) to conclude that: Even while zero-tolerance policing enjoys the embrace of ever-growing numbers of politicos on both sides of the [Atlantic], evidence in the US has gradually accumulated that the strategy has unleashed a wave of police misconduct unseen in decades. In sum, a careful reading of the available research on ‘order maintenance’ policing - understood as the very strict policing of a small area with particular crime problems – should prompt sober reflection rather than precipitate action for, as Jordan (1998: 72-3) concludes in a punctiliously impartial review of the evidence for the British Home Office: Research suggests that [‘zero tolerance’] must be used with caution. There is moderately strong evidence that it can reduce crime in the short term, but there are question marks over the ability of the police to distinguish between firm and harsh policing styles, and over the long term effect of arresting many more people for minor offences. Zero tolerance in South AfricaGiven the controversy surrounding it in the North/West, and the country’s very recent experience of policing based on the most pernicious form of racial intolerance, it is slightly surprising that notions of zero tolerance have gained any currency in South Africa at all. That they have can be attributed to a combination of factors including the entrepreneurial efforts of William Bratton and his associates, and the eagerness of politicians to find a panacea for crime running at levels widely perceived to represent a threat to democracy.Bratton himself first appeared in South Africa in August 1996 less than five months after standing down as Commissioner in New York. In coverage that could hardly have been more favourable if it had been paid for, the liberal Mail & Guardian announced that Bratton - reincarnated as the head of First Security Consulting Inc - was ‘bringing with him [the New York] style of policing which he plans to sell round the world’ (Johnson, 1996). Although Johnson mentioned the debate about the provenance of the reduction in crime in New York, she made no attempt to resolve it and contented herself with the observation that the increase in police numbers, demographic change and a shakeout in the drugs market ‘undoubtedly’ played a part. But the main focus of both her article and a much longer interview with Bratton himself (‘NY’s top cop tells how he cut crime’, Mail & Guardian, 2 August 1996) was his success in running a police department ‘like a business, with crime as the product’. [lxiii] A measure of Bratton’s achievement in making his account of events in New York - and his role in them - the common-sense understanding of leading pundits in the South African media is evident in the following paragraph dropped casually into an article by Steven Friedman, Director of the Centre for Policy Studies: Nor are there good reasons why ideas proposed by former New York police chief William Bratton, who reduced crime levels dramatically and visited here recently, should not be implemented. (Friedman, 1996: 3) Over the next three years ‘zero tolerance’ wormed its way into the South African lexicon with insidious ease appearing in contexts as varied as police corruption and corporate governance.[lxiv] But it was not until January 1999 with the country’s second democratic election imminent and crime likely to be a prominent issue with the voters that South Africa was treated to a second visit by a man ‘credited with turning New York’s crime around’.[lxv] This time it was the turn of Jack Maple, a colleague of William Bratton’s from his New York days, to tour the country. Reports of the visit suggest that Maple – a guest of the New National Party - may have been more willing to play to the political and media gallery than his former chief and he was quoted as saying that then Safety and Security Minister Sydney Mufamadi ought to be dismissed for meeting a well known fugitive in prison (‘Minister must be axed for Chauke visit, says expert’, Business Day, 21 January 1999).[lxvi] On policing, Maple was unapologetic in claiming that 'zero tolerance is the only solution to a lasting cut in crime’ (‘Zero tolerance puts lasting lid on crime, says New York cop’, Cape Argus, 29 January 1999). Meanwhile his hosts rushed to add ‘zero tolerance’ to the panoply of tough measures, including the reintroduction of the death penalty, police ‘empowerment’ and a Brattonesque commitment to greater managerial accountability, contained in their justice blueprint for the forthcoming election (Camerer, 1999).[lxvii] Localising democratic policing in Cape Town 1996-99The rest of this study is devoted to the way that these globalised northern/western models of sector and zero tolerance policing - and the terminology that goes with them – have been applied and localised in Cape Town.[lxviii] Sector policingThe starting point for this aspect of the study was a project known as Ithemba initiated in Nyanga on the Cape Flats by the then station commissioner, Ganief Daniels. According to a brief but intriguing description of Ithemba contained in a handbook on ‘local partnership policing’ produced by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), the project ‘tailored the international concept of "sector policing" to fit the South African environment’ (ISS, nd: V2-3). Aimed at bringing policing closer to the community, it involved dividing Nyanga into 10 residential and 3 business sectors each with its own ‘police and community anti-crime force’. However, preliminary discussions with the provincial Department of Safety and Security and a non-governmental organisation active in the Nyanga area suggested that, in addition to this ‘classical’ form of sector policing, station areas (including Nyanga) were also being clustered together to form larger units as part of a programme that was also widely referred to as ‘sector policing’. [lxix] Each of these variants of sector policing – station and area-level - will be considered in turn. Classical or station-level sector policing in Nyanga and KraaifonteinAs an organisational reform, Project Ithemba, bears a strong resemblance to the kind of classical sector policing introduced in London in the early 1990s. Yet in many other respects it reflects the vastly different – probably unique – social and political conditions of the post-apartheid ‘African’ township. From the point of Ithemba’s founder and driving force, Director (now Commissioner) Ganief Daniels, his career as station commissioner at Nyanga could not have got off to a worse start. "Unfortunately the community rejected my appointment saying they were not consulted. They would not accept my appointment." Negotiations with politicians and local people went on for almost two months before he was able to take up his post in February 1996. When he finally did start, he found Nyanga police station in a ‘mess’. More than half of the police officers under his command were illiterate. Worse still, Nyanga seemed to have been used as a punishment posting and many of them had been ‘transferred from other police stations [as] troublemakers’. Daniels’s priorities were clear: "The first thing I did was … to make sure that the working environment of the police officers was conducive to them being able to perform. And then the second thing is that [I] decided we will have to train the police and we will have to activate the community as well. One of the things that I realised there is, there is so much crime in [this] area - crimes against women, children, murders, robberies, you name it - that it is going to be impossible, with a handful of police officers, to address the dire need of the community …" Outside the organisation, his first port of call was the CPF. In consultation with them, Daniels identified roughly half of the Nyanga police station area - covering the informal settlements of Philippi East and Brown’s Farm - as the ‘biggest problem’. At his suggestion, the area was divided up into ‘blocks’ and the residents of each block were asked to elect a committee of eight to ten people who would then be ‘mandated by the community in that particular block … to work out a strategy with the local police’. Having thus – to use the terminology of CAMPS – consulted the community and begun the task of mobilising its resources at block level, Daniels then began adapting his own organisation by permanently assigning five police officials to each of the eight sectors that had been created.[lxx] Particular locations (shebeens) and times (Friday evenings and weekends) were also identified as the main focus for problem solving activity in the form of regular patrols and meetings with shebeen owners about closing times. Although the circumstances of his appointment and the conditions he encountered when he eventually arrived at Nyanga were quite unlike anything an American or British police manager might expect to confront, many features of Daniels’s response could have been plucked from the pages of an Anglo-American text on community policing. Yet Daniels and his successor as station commissioner at Nyanga, Director Simon Mpembe, deny that they relied on any imported model as a blueprint for station-level sector policing. (Apart from inheriting Project Ithemba from Daniels, Mpembe had also introduced a form of classical sector policing during his time as station commissioner at Kraaifontein prior to his transfer to Nyanga). While both are aware in general terms of innovations in policing in the North/West, they see their initiatives very much as creative responses to local conditions – and in particular to a lack of resources.[lxxi] Influences come not just from what these senior officials have read (or seen) of policing in the US, the UK and continental Europe but also from observing the way things are done much closer to home in Botswana and Zimbabwe. I … liked the style of Zimbabwe. They were very good at community policing and that is most of the stuff that I preferred. But in England I’ve got other guys I know – I’ve got friends there of course. So one is communicating … But you see what is happening is that other countries are very rich. And it is very easy to apply [ideas like sector policing]. But when it comes to South Africa it’s a bit difficult. We are a country which is still developing. But you put all the concepts together and, because of the background that you have about the Africans, you look upon them and you say this one would work and you put it into practice. And then you see as to whether it works … [PO1, 10.6.99] You see it was very difficult – now that I’m thinking of the British [experience] – to use that kind of model in the township. You wouldn’t even try to think of it because if you go to your boss telling him about it, [he’ll say], ‘Are you mad? Where are you going to get the cops?’ I’m also working with a difficult community, a really difficult community. [PO2, 20.7.99] So in Nyanga it was essential that people became involved not just in agreeing to police strategy but also in the day-to-day work of policing their neighbourhoods. You see I didn’t have any alternative … I didn’t really know what the London concept was. My problem was I never had enough police officers to do the job. I can only give them [the community] a minimum number of police officers and resources so we’re multiplying the police personnel by utilising the community. [PO2, 20.7.99] In order to achieve this ‘multiplier’ effect, the eight sector committees covering Philippi East were encouraged to find 30 people prepared to patrol problem areas at times of peak demand on the police. Equipped with identifying jackets and two-way radios with which to call their sector police for support these patrols were critical to the success of the Project.[lxxii] By becoming directly involved in mediating disputes and resolving a multitude of local problems, these patrols involved ordinary citizens in state-centred community policing in a way that would have been unthinkable in London.[lxxiii] Mobilising local people had another important benefit for the police in Philippi East with its history of poor or non-existent police/community relations. Residents patrolling the informal settlements on foot had access to places, people and problems that no police official in a van could, or would dare attempt to, reach. With the legacy of its repressive role in the ‘struggle’ years still hanging like a millstone about its neck, the SAPS was able to use the local knowledge and public acceptability of community patrols to ‘identify the bad spots that we [the SAPS] could not enter’.[lxxiv] In one sense then, classical station-level sector policing in Cape Town is much like state police-centred community policing anywhere else in the world. Its implementation in places like Nyanga is a testament to the extent to which at least some police managers have absorbed the lessons of history, learnt to adopt new ways of working, and come to understand how they can be used to the advantage of a police organisation freshly charged with the mission of winning the ‘war against crime’.[lxxv] What I noticed was that in the past – I’m a person who learns from my mistakes – one of the mistakes that happened was that there was no link between us, the police, and the community. We were operating with a different identity … but then I realised that it’s much better if you talk to people. And if you talk to people you get information quickly. And once you are in touch, once the police service is in touch with the community, you know exactly what is happening, and what is going to happen. And then you can plan and act proactively. But if you are not in touch with your community, then you get problems. So as a station commissioner when I was at a small station … I used to visit the community leaders. I had regular meetings with them … where they could tell me what problems they have. And that enabled me to sit down and plan and to identify problems in time. What I noticed was that if you didn’t have that contact with the community and those who wanted to access us in certain instances, they were getting problems because of our attitudes. But they also had the wrong attitude, seeing the police as the enemy. But I realised that if one utilises communications properly and you have personal contact … then people realise that there is nothing wrong with the police … [BD: ‘They’re human beings as well …’] Yes, they are just human beings and you explain to them your problems. So … I told my cops, I said to them, ‘Now, the style of policing has changed: it is community policing, and community policing will have to work with these people. [PO1, 10.6.99] This quotation neatly encapsulates how a senior South African police official used his own experience of working closely with the public at a small station to develop an area-based approach to policing at a larger station, and make it work to his advantage in ways that are immediately recognisable to students of Anglo-American literature on police-centred community policing. The community was able to explain its problems to ‘their’ station commissioner and ‘their’ sector officials but, at the same time, the police were able both to collect information – the lifeblood of conventional crime-fighting police work – from the public and to manage popular expectations of the police.[lxxvi] Yet in another sense the kind of programme initiated in Nyanga and Kraaifontein was the product of circumstances alien to the relatively comfortable world of Anglo-American community policing. Faced with the sometimes personal hostility of the public, the divisive legacy of apartheid, and the knowledge that their meagre resources and limited organisational capacity made it impossible for the police to work alone, station-level sector policing in these two areas of Cape Town seems to have depended on active citizenship - and the co-production of neighbourhood security - to an extent that even its most enthusiastic supporters in the North/West might have found hard to stomach (Johnston, 1993). Thus, even in its classical guise, the global model of sector policing was at least partially indigenised. Cluster or area-level sector policing in Elsies RiverThe other context in which the term is used in Cape Town puts the disaggregation process central to station-level ‘sector policing’ into reverse. Instead of dividing individual station areas up into smaller blocks or sectors, this second form of area-level sector policing brings neighbouring stations together into ‘clusters’. This form of policing is common throughout the SAPS’s East and West Metropoles and is much more likely to be understood by practitioners as ‘sector policing’ than the classical variant implemented as Project Ithemba and in Kraaifontein.[lxxvii] One of the first areas where cluster sector policing was attempted covers five station areas in the East Metropole north of the main N2 highway and Cape Town International Airport.[lxxviii] Known by participants as the ‘Big Five’, the stations serve working class ‘coloured communities’ with a common problem of gang-related crime.[lxxix] As Elsies River Station Commissioner, William Pienaar put it: In order to cope with the violence, in order to follow up, we, the five station commissioners come together, held a meeting, and realised that the same types of crimes occurred in the station [areas] … over the boundaries …’ But, like its equivalent at station-level, cluster sector policing was also a creative managerial response to a lack of resources. We’ve got a lack of manpower at stations. We’ve got a lack of vehicle power. It’s a problem. And through this idea we’ve put all the crime prevention units together. Now you still have 5 persons doing crime prevention duties [at each station] … [but] if 5 [stations] come together you’ve got 25 and we make now a bigger impact. [PO3, 11.6.99] As these quotations show, area-level sector policing allows scarce resources to be concentrated on problems arising across several station areas either on a temporary basis as the example of political violence in Nyanga/Crossroads suggests, or more routinely in response to the chronic problem of gangsterism in the cluster of stations around Elsies River. [After clustering stations together] suddenly you’ve got a broader mission. You look to your station … but [if you take] a person like, for example, say [EL] … he’s one of the gang leaders of The Firm, he’s got businesses in Belhar, he’s also got businesses in Ravensmead, and he’s also got businesses in Elsies River. Now for the first time, if I need to, we can now focus on three different areas. Where when I worked alone I just checked my area, I didn’t focus on other areas, now we’re getting to link the three premises of … a gang leader or a gang boss … and we [the station commissioners] draw up plans together, crime prevention planning. We gather the resources of the 5 stations, we put all the information together and with that information we can do a plan. [PO3, 11.6.99] At its simplest, clustering serves to break up the artificial barriers created by the territorial nature of police work and exclusive ownership of ‘the ground’ policed by a particular unit (Holdaway, 1983: chapter 4). In as much as classical sector policing is an attempt to reinforce and refocus the feelings of ownership police officials have for an area and its problems, clustering may seem a contradictory policy. Yet this has not prevented stations from attempting to implement both forms of sector policing at the same time. Thus, in Elsies River, the station functions as part of a cluster, but is also divided up into 4 station-level sectors.[lxxx] The harsh social and economic realities of Elsies River where, in the first 5 months of 1999, the police recorded a total of 26 gang-related murders and no fewer than 64 attempted murders also provide a graphic example of how specific, localised orders are negotiated between the police and a population with what may, at best, be an ambivalent attitude towards the formal, legal order of the state. In attempting to implement a globalised form of democratic ‘community’ policing like sector policing, officials have to work with people who are either intimidated by gangs or dependent on them for their financial and physical security. [I]t’s a problem here … to a large extent we have [gangsters] getting money and paying [people’s] rent.’ […] A certain area … is an ‘American’ area, and people are .… wearing [American] clothes and wearing flags. So in that community you won’t get [anyone] registered as an informer. […] When you get violence or gang fights, they withdraw. They don’t speak. They won’t tell you [who has been involved] in a shooting.’ [PO3, 11.6.99 Incapable of ‘solving’ the gang ‘problem’ by the use of force, the police are compelled to use less confrontational methods of reducing the harm that results from sporadic turf wars and the violent resolution of ‘business’ disputes. When there’s gang violence, when they’re shooting each other, robbing each other … we go to the gang leaders, call them in, and say, ‘Listen here, you are a leader of The Firm, you are a general of The Firm, you can control your people. I can control my people. I am the station commissioner here. You know, you people, you’re a businessman …’ So [you use a bit of] psychology and you tell them, ‘You’re in business, you’ve got a shebeen, you sell liquor, liquor is not a problem with me. But mandrax is a problem with me because [people are committing crime] to buy mandrax. You can sell liquor but if you don’t control your area, there’s rape, there’s a lot of crimes, then you’re in trouble with me [and] I must seize your liquor … psychology …’ BD: So you actually get the gang leaders in and talk to them about this … get them round a table and say, ‘Look you do this …’ You know who they are and they know that you know who they are. ‘Yes. I tell them, I don’t fight you, I don’t fight your guards, but I fight their deeds. I fight their deeds. You’ve got the new constitution, you’ve got human rights, chapter 2 … but I fight your deeds because whenever you commit an offence there is a restriction on your rights. And if you want me as the station commissioner to control my policemen, so you are the general of The Firm so you can control your people. Why are they fighting? And you get the other gang in and they talk. They must talk because, at the end of the day, you make business, he makes business, you can’t make business when there’s fighting … [When] they talk to each other, they don’t have a reason to fight. If I’ve got enough manpower, if I’ve got enough resources, I don’t have to try and talk to you, I’ll go straight and … but I haven’t got manpower so I must use another strategy. [PO3, 11.6.99] This kind of policing by proxy through the negotiation of local orders with those in a better position to enforce them than the state police has a long history. Indeed Davis (1989: 81) has argued that, as a method of policing urban Britain’s most dangerous ghettos, it predates any idea of ‘community policing’ by well over 100 years and was a feature of the early days of the ‘new police’ in Victorian London: But if ‘community policing’ has become a catch phrase of the 1980s, it … has been argued here that … in practice [it] by no means represented a radical departure for English law enforcement. Instead, ‘community policing’ is more properly seen as the continuance of a long tradition of English policing, which has recognized certain urban areas peopled by the poor and immigrants as de facto no-go areas, has sought to contain these areas through collaboration with individuals and groups who dominate informal networks of power and influence within them, and which has accepted this as the necessary price to be paid for the heavy-handed and biased policing of such groups outside. [lxxxi] It is the purpose of the next section of this study to consider one way in which police might respond to the invasion of the respectable world outside by the people of the ghettos, their violence, their incivility and their problems – zero tolerance. Zero toleranceWith South Africa’s high crime levels it is perhaps inevitable that the subtler nuances of Wilson and Kelling’s ‘broken windows’ theory and William Bratton’s ‘re-engineering’ of the New York Police Department have become overshadowed by the brutal simplicity of zero tolerance as the central component of order maintenance community policing. A couple of the police and civilian administrators spoken to during the course of this study were more impressed by, as one put it, Bratton’s ‘business improvement’ efforts during his time as Commissioner than the zero tolerance street policing tactics generally attributed to him.[lxxxii] One even offered a concise, impromptu, but coherent summary of the connection between ‘broken windows’ theory and zero tolerance: But in terms of zero tolerance … Look zero tolerance means zero tolerance whether it’s a dog licence or a bicycle licence or somebody throwing a sweet paper on the floor or jumping red robots or stealing or crime, it’s zero tolerance. And of course likewise broken windows theory. You know, the whole philosophy of, if you see the building standing there [and] one window breaks and if you come back the next day ten are broken … then it’s very difficult to turn that around. To keep things in order you need to act swiftly and quickly … [CO1, 10.6.99] But for most respondents zero tolerance was too simple a concept to require much explanation. My understanding was one should tackle the shebeens, the petty traffic crimes ... also petty offences such as malicious damage to property, domestic violence where a man is beating his wife, … the bergies and street children. [PO1, 10.6.99] Indeed some observers see zero tolerance being interpreted even more crudely by the SAPS as giving them ‘carte blanche’ to ‘do whatever you have to do’ in the face of rising levels of crime.[lxxxiii] On two things, however, all respondents were agreed. Firstly, they denied being involved in anything that could be described as ‘zero tolerance policing’. And, secondly, they did not believe that - on their understanding of what it might involve – zero tolerance could work in the South African context. Several believed that a regime of strict enforcement might be an effective antidote to the culture of lawlessness infecting contemporary South Africa. But even they saw efforts at defining deviancy back up more as an aspiration than a practical proposition. By failing to apply the ZT concept, you know what happens, the culture of crime becomes acceptable in South Africa. You see the problem with the taxi people … they stop anywhere … that is the culture we have. [PO1, 10.6.99] A number of explanations for zero tolerance’s impracticality in the South African context were offered ranging from the incapacity of an under-resourced police force and over-stretched criminal justice system to sustain it to doubts about its constitutionality and public acceptability in a country where the memory of apartheid kragdadigheid remains fresh. Precisely how these doubts arose in the course of three recent operations that have attracted media attention as examples of ‘zero tolerance policing’ will emerge from what follows. ‘Saturation’ and ‘crackdown’
policing:
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Office:
Institute of Criminology, University of Cape Town
Contact: Resource
Centre Co-ordinator
Date: 11 April 2003
