Zero Tolerance: The Hard Edge of Community Policing

Bill Dixon
Institute of Criminology, University of Cape Town

Published in African Security Review Vol 9 No 3, 2000

INTRODUCTION


‘Zero tolerance’ is a popular slogan for politicians talking tough. But, where did it come from and can it work? Recent experience in Cape Town suggests that, under South African conditions, the rhetoric of zero tolerance is more powerful than the reality. Since Steve Tshwete replaced Sydney Mufamadi as minister for Safety and Security, community policing has been edged out by effective crime-fighting as the dominant theme in police transformation. If it is to survive at all, it seems likely to do so only in its most muscular form as zero tolerance policing — what Bayley and Shearing call "community policing with a hard edge."1

The aim of this article is to trace the origins of the global phenomenon of zero tolerance and offer some words of caution on its use as a model for policing in South Africa based on experiences both in the United States and the United Kingdom where it originated, and on the streets of Cape Town over the last two years.

BEYOND 'BROKEN WINDOWS' 


One of the oddest things about zero tolerance policing is that its popularity with politicians is equalled only by the dismay with which everyone else tends to greet the suggestion that they might have had something to do with inventing it. Brought in for questioning about their involvement, administrators turned entrepreneurs like former commissioner William Bratton2 of the New York Police Department (NYPD), and scholars such as James Q Wilson and George Kelling3 of ‘broken windows’ fame, either protest a lifelong distaste for ‘over-zealous policing’ or claim to be the innocent authors of programmes too sophisticated to be reduced to anything so crude as "kicking ass and taking names."4 Even Bratton’s leading British disciple, a headline-grabbing detective named Ray Mallon, prefers to describe his style of policing as no more than ‘confident’ in an attempt to distance himself from the controversy surrounding zero tolerance.5

How seriously should these protestations of innocence be taken? Clearly, there is much more to Wilson and Kelling’s ‘broken windows’ theory than sweeping the streets clean of beggars, prostitutes, drunks, drug addicts and ‘squeegee merchants’. And, Bratton’s time in New York was marked as much by managerial reforms as new operational tactics. It also has to be said — as Wilson, Kelling, Bratton and Mallon all do — that inflexible, intolerant policing is something of a contradiction in terms. As all practical police officials know, and scholars have repeatedly emphasised, policing is all about discretion. It is all about knowing when to use the battery of coercive powers available to the police — and when not to use them.

To talk of zero tolerance is in some ways to caricature what this influential group of theorists and practitioners advocate. But, all of them argue — and make no excuses for doing so — that the police must be much more assertive, confident, even aggressive in maintaining order and supporting communities wracked by crime, fear and insecurity. Clamp-down on the ‘incivilities’ — public drunkenness, aggressive begging and so on — that trouble ordinary communities and law-abiding citizens going about their business will be reinvigorated, and the level of ‘real’ crime such as burglary and street robbery will fall.

ON THE STREETS


So much for the theory of what — to use a more neutral term than zero tolerance — is sometimes called ‘order maintenance policing’: but, does it work in practice, and at what cost? This is where the controversies begin. New York’s ‘plummeting’ crime (down by 37% between 1994 and 1997) and homicide rates (down by over 50%) are routinely attributed (and not just by Bratton himself) to the former commissioner’s zero tolerance strategy. But, the rough coincidence between Bratton’s time in New York and falling crime is not sufficient to prove any causal connection between the two events.6 The managerial and other changes made in the NYPD by Bratton and his predecessor, Lee Brown — including the recruitment of 7 000 additional police officers — make it impossible to attribute any crime reduction effects resulting from Bratton’s policies to the introduction of order maintenance policing alone. What is more, crime also fell in 17 out of 25 of the largest US cities between 1993 and 1996. Among these 17 were places such as San Diego where vastly different policies of problem-oriented ‘neighbourhood policing’ were implemented and Oakland where no significant change in strategy occurred at all.7

More serious still is the charge levelled by senior British police official, Charles Pollard. He argues that the culture of aggressive policing, confrontational management, opportunistic short-termism and undue emphasis on ‘the numbers game’, fostered by Bill Bratton in the US and Ray Mallon in the UK poses an enormous threat to the future.

Pollard’s argument is simple. "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."8 It is clear that Pollard believes — by encouraging aggression and rule-bending by officers striving to meet ambitious crime reduction targets — that ‘New York-style’ policing threatens to undermine the trust and confidence of the public on which all democratic policing ultimately depends. Like many other police professionals, Pollard believes that the short-term fix of order maintenance policing offers no long-term solution to complex social problems of poverty and social exclusion and, in fact, may make them worse.

Other critics go further, pointing out that Bratton’s approach to street policing led to a 41% increase in civilian complaints of excessive force against the police, while compensation payments to victims of police brutality in New York City rose from US $13.5 million in 1992 to US $24 million four years later.9 On this evidence, Shapiro concludes 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."
If the sound and fury of the arguments for or against zero tolerance are put to one side for a moment, the most that can be said for order maintenance policing is that — understood as the strict policing of a small area with special crime problems rather than its adoption as a departmental or organisational policy — it can help to reduce crime, at least in the short term. But, even then, questions remain "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."10

SOUTH AFRICA


Why then has zero tolerance become such a feature of the debate about policing in South Africa, a country with vivid recent experience of policing motivated by policies of the most extreme racial and political intolerance? The answer to this conundrum seems to be that the efforts of Bratton and his associates to promote ‘New York-style’ policing around the globe have coincided with an eagerness on the part of some prominent politicians and police officials to find a silver bullet solution to crime running at levels widely thought to represent a threat to South Africa’s infant democracy. The last five years have seen widely publicised visits to South Africa by both Bratton himself (in August 1996) and, more recently, by a senior colleague from his days at the NYPD, Jack Maple. By the time Maple arrived in January 1999, the country was in the run-up to its second democratic election and politicians — well aware of the rhetorical power of zero tolerance — queued up to jump on the New York bandwagon. (Both the New National Party and the Pan Africanist Congress made explicit reference to zero tolerance in their law and order manifestos.)

As part of a wider investigation of the way in which theories and styles of policing are transmitted around the world and adopted and adapted in countries with very different histories and political cultures, a small number of senior police and crime prevention officials were interviewed in the Western Cape. All of the respondents quoted here, both inside and outside the South African Police Service (SAPS), had been personally involved in policing initiatives that had — at one time or another — attracted the ‘zero tolerance’ label. Their experiences suggest that, if zero tolerance has taken root in South Africa, the most fertile soil has proven to be not practical police work, but the imaginations of journalists and politicians with an eye for a striking headline.

Though they paid tribute to the impact of Wilson, Kelling, Bratton and Maple on police thinking, Cape Town’s senior police officials, like their counterparts overseas, were anxious to distance themselves from the crude simplicities of zero tolerance. One council law enforcement officer was more impressed by what Bratton had done to make the NYPD more businesslike as an organisation, than with the street sweeping policing tactics generally attributed to him. Another put the difficulties of implementing zero tolerance in South Africa like this:
"[T]he idea of zero tolerance and the broken window philosophy have certainly shaken some of the law enforcement officers here. But I doubt if it will be implemented with any success here, simply because we don’t have the manpower to deal with it. And I think also the immense diversity in the population and the communication that we need to do is extremely difficult or creates tremendous problems. What we can do — in the city particularly — is high impact policing projects, what I commonly term saturation exercises. You take all your available resources and you put them into a problem area and … you do an intervention which is normally one week, intensive, to a crime hot spot or a problem area. You try to flush it out or sterilise it or sanitise it. But then you have to withdraw because you can’t sustain that. It’s impossible, you can’t sustain it."
Indeed, these two themes — the impossibility of sustaining a ‘high impact’ style of policing and the need to be sensitive to South Africa’s immense cultural diversity — ran like golden threads through all these interviews.

LACK OF RESOURCES


One SAPS officer acknowledged that the police cannot hope to enforce all laws all of the time. Even with the help of the community, the police cannot do more than begin to tackle the prevailing ‘culture of crime’:
"[L]et us utilise other sources of law enforcement … like the community. But [total enforcement] won’t be able to be done — even if you use those people — a hundred per cent."
As hard-pressed local government officers discovered, the stark reality is that they do not have the resources needed to keep even a very small part of Cape Town’s central business district free of traffic violators and informal parking attendants for more than a few months. Moreover, even if front-line enforcement capacity could be increased by recruiting many more municipal police officials, bottlenecks elsewhere in an already overstretched justice system would prevent large numbers of minor ‘quality of life’ offenders from being processed. In fact, as one manager indicated, the reluctance of magistrates to take breaches of municipal by-laws seriously and impose what the authorities regard as appropriate penalties has already persuaded the City Council to establish its own municipal courts, and to consider ‘outsourcing’ its sheriffs department to ensure that fines are paid.

PUBLIC ACCEPTABILITY


Doubts about the practicality of zero tolerance in the South African context are reinforced by concerns over its constitutionality and public acceptability in an environment where memories of apartheid’s forcefulness (kragdadigheid) remain fresh. Thus, an SAPS officer intimately involved in dealing with ‘urban terrorism’ in the Western Cape recalled how attempts to use a zero tolerance approach to the problem had to be curtailed in the face of popular concerns about police ‘harassment’ of the (predominantly Muslim) leadership of People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad):
"Zero tolerance should have meant that one would tackle the urban terror suspects for petty offences such as failure to carry a driver’s licence, driving maybe an unlicensed vehicle or a vehicle with a [bad] tyre. But when we applied that, there were a lot of complaints that we were harassing them. The media started actually giving publicity to them … they called that some sort of harassment. [T]hey saw [police tactics] as some sort of … apartheid where we [were] discriminating [against] the Muslim community. And because of that sensitivity — because we [didn’t] want to be associated with apartheid — we had to review that situation."
In a country still nervous of anything resembling the draconian and discriminatory police practices of the past, this officer and his colleagues rapidly came to the conclusion that, though this form of zero tolerance policing might win them a few battles against individual suspects, it threatened to lose them the support of the public, and with it the ‘war’ against ‘urban terrorism’.

The prevailing mood among both the SAPS and local government officials who were spoken to was captured by a senior municipal law enforcement officer who cautioned that, before anything resembling zero tolerance policing could be attempted in South Africa, great care would have to be taken to make sure that such an operational strategy was sustainable, credible and broadly acceptable to the public:
"We … can never claim … that we’re conducting a zero tolerance approach to law enforcement in Cape Town or South Africa. We can never try and pull the wool over people’s eyes — they’re not going to be that stupid. They realise that we can’t do it. Also … you’ve got to prepare the ground if you’re going to engage in extremely heightened or intensive law enforcement activity. Half of your success, more than half of your success, depends on the community and their acceptance of your policing principles."

CONCLUSION


The picture that emerges from all this is that, in a country where levels of crime remain stubbornly high and public demands for something, anything, to be done about them are as deafening as they are insistent, zero tolerance is likely to be more effective as a piece of political rhetoric than a practical or desirable model of democratic policing. What zero tolerance represents — in South Africa as elsewhere — is not so much the reality of policing as conceived or implemented by police managers, but a platform for electioneering politicians and a source of lively copy for lazy journalists. Only occasionally will desperate — or perhaps desperately ambitious — law enforcement officials resort to such populism in the hope of convincing the world — and quite possibly themselves — that they can do something about crime.

The experience of order maintenance policing in the US and the UK suggests that, even in the short term, it is unlikely to reduce levels of crime throughout an entire city as dramatically as its supporters claim, while in the longer term, zero tolerance may have the kind of corrosive effect on public confidence in the police that South Africa can ill afford. Meanwhile, recent experiments in the Western Cape indicate that, under local conditions, ‘high impact’ policing is impossible to sustain without a massive and unaffordable increase in resources. It may be politically unacceptable, in any case, as long as the intolerance and brutality of apartheid policing remain a part of the life experience of so many South Africans.

NOTES


The author would like to thank the Institute of Criminology, University of Cape town, for funding the research on which this article is based, as well as Elrena van der Spuy for her comments on this article in draft from. The original research report was published as B Dixon, The globalisation of democratic policing: Sector policing and zero tolerance in the new South Africa,, Institute of Criminology, University of Cape Town, 2000.
  1. D Bayley & C Shearing, The future of policing, Law and Society Review 30(3), 1996, p 589.

  2. W Bratton, Crime is down in New York City: Blame the police, in N Dennis (ed), Zero tolerance: Policing a free society, Institute of Economic Affairs, London, 1998.

  3. J Q Wilson & G Kelling, Broken windows: The police and neighbourhood safety, Atlantic Monthly 127, March 1982, pp 29-38.

  4. B Dixon, The globalisation of democratic policing: Sector policing and zero tolerance in the new South Africa, occasional paper, Institute of Criminology, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, 2000.

  5. N Dennis & R Mallon, Confident policing in Hartlepool, in Dennis (ed), op cit.

  6. J Young, The exclusive society, Sage, London, 1999, pp 124-126; B Bowling, The rise and fall of New York murder: Zero tolerance or crack’s decline?, British Journal of Criminology 34(4), 1999, pp 531-554.

  7. C Pollard, Zero tolerance: Short-term fix, long-term liability?, in Dennis (ed), op cit; 1998; Young, ibid.

  8. Pollard, ibid, p 61.

  9. B Shapiro, Zero tolerance gospel, 1997, <www.oneworld.org/index_oc/issue497/shapiro.html>. Judit Greene presents similar evidence of the negative impact of aggressive quality of life policing in Zero tolerance: A case study of police policies and practices in New York City, Crime and Delinquency 45(2), 1999, pp 171-187.

  10. P Jordan, Effective policing strategies for reducing crime, in { Goldblatt & C Lewis (eds), Reducing offending, Home Office Research Study 187, Home Office, London, 1998, pp 72-73.