Policing in South Africa is all about buzzwords

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Cape Town - Policing in the country is full of catchy phrases, but police have little to show as crime and violence remain high, and trust in the police is low. This is according to the senior researcher: justice and violence prevention at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), Dr Andrew Faull. Faull said police strategies were not mutually exclusive. These include “community policing”, “broken-windows policing”, “intelligence-led policing”, “back-to-basics policing”, “sector policing”, “hot spot policing” and “problem-oriented policing”. Faull said community policing was a philosophy under which almost any other intervention could be implemented. “Similarly, one can do intelligence-led, broken-windows or zero-tolerance policing in crime hot spots, or simply ‘do’ hotspot policing by itself.” “It’s important for politicians and the public to ask what police mean when they use these buzzwords. And police should demonstrate that they plan, monitor and evaluate the impact of their work to ascertain whether it actually gets the desired results,” he said.

“Although the police have an impressive performance-monitoring system, it doesn’t incentivise the evaluation of specific police practices at station level. Rather it captures a wealth of useful but often oblique information that reveals little about what the police actually do.”

Faull said when reported crime went up, or surveys showed public trust going down, it was difficult to link those trends to police practices. To fix that, the police should institutionalise the key tenets of evidence-based policing.

He said the approach suggested that policing should be based on the best existing research “evidence” about which police activities really work, and which don’t.

Faull said throughout 2019, the ISS worked with the police, academics, and research and policy community to raise awareness and understanding around evidence-based policing.

Delft Community Policing Forum chairperson Charles George said: “We need to look at the police as a service provider in the proper context, meaning there are police officers working around the clock trying their best to assist our communities, and on the other hand we have bad officers.

“There’s also political crisis where the president pardons 14000 prisoners and they get released into our communities and get straight back into criminal activities,” George said.

He said the previous night when over 100 neighbourhood watch CPF members together with the newly appointed station commander patrolled the streets in Delft, there were no incidents.

A community activist from Bonteheuwel, Henriette Abrahams, said Police Minister Bheki Cele and the president kept making promises and did not deliver. “We’ve had two crime summits but none of our outcomes have been implemented.”

Abrahams said to deal with crime “we need to deal with poverty and inequality in our communities”.

In November last year, the Western Cape government launched its new Safety Plan, which makes explicit reference to evidence-based policing and violence prevention.

Faull said that was an exciting and noteworthy development that should be extended across the country.

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