Policing authority and state politics exist in a complicated and yet inextricable relationship. Governments attain legitimacy only when the police are perceived as protectors of the people, guarding against crime; yet when policing powers grow too excessive they encounter resistance protesting state control. This delicate balance between agency and accountability is only more imperiled when state and society undergo significant change, such as occurs in colonization or its collapse.
Indeed, these alternate situations can often seem similar, as was most recently illustrated by the appointment, on behalf of the “advisory powers,” to oversee policing in post-Saddam Iraq. Stephen White, the second-most senior officer in Northern Ireland, and one of Britain’s highest-ranking cops, was commissioned in July to train an Iraqi force. His appointment, based on White’s previous record of command in South Africa as well as in Northern Ireland, exemplifies the importance of policing to rebuilding state stability and, in this acknowledged continuity between South Africa and Northern Ireland to contemporary Iraq, calls attention to the relevance of policing practice to studies of colonialism and colonial history.
Crime and Policing in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Transforming Under Fire is an informative exploration of precisely these issues impacting contemporary politics and policing-those scenarios in which Stephen White would have been involved. The book, a history and evaluation of the challenges faced by South African authorities during the transition to majority rule in 1994, details the close relationship of policing authority and state politics during the apartheid era, when police acted with relative impunity against criminals and political opponents alike.
The book also describes the morass of the current situation, in which organized crime and violent assaults are so rampant that one of the world’s largest police forces is helpless at preventing South Africa from being the murder capital of the world. The author, Mark Shaw, sees clearly how the current situation is only an ironic recapitulation of the conditions of apartheid, in which feelings of physical insecurity reinforce the divisions of society, and “the divide between different citizens-represented most visibly by the walls erected around middle-class neighborhoods which aim to shut out outsiders-will be seen as a reality of society, rather than something which can be altered” (146). The burden of political legitimacy, Shaw argues, is effective police reform-a process that the author shows to have been misguided in the years since transition but which Shaw also feels can still be saved by judicious change.
Clear and concise, Crime and Policing in Post-Apartheid South Africa is an excellent case study for histories of colonial policing and the role of policing authority in the era of devolution, particularly in the explicitly racialized context of apartheid. Like previous studies of colonial policing by David Anderson and David Killingray, Shaw narrates the typical steps in police reform, such as the abrogation of paramilitarism and the mandate for racial integration, increased accountability, decentralized municipal policing, a new emphasis on community policing, and symbolic change-such as the addition of “service” to the official name. All these steps attempt to project a new idea of “a people’s police” (119).
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The volume also provides a morbidly fascinating glimpse into a remarkable degree of police power, revealing an absence of monitors that other cities and countries take for granted. For example, Shaw notes that it was only in 1991 that South African law proposed that police vehicle registration numbers should be painted on cars and that officers wear name tags, thereby enabling the public to identify them (24). At the same time, though, Shaw maintains a fair and balanced evaluation of the challenges faced by local authorities. One chapter of the volume clears the smoke around a number of statistics bruited in local and international media that paint an overly horrific picture of South African crime, emphasizing the gap between the local fear index and actual rates of victimization, much as Barry Glasser conducts in Culture of Fear (1999).
'Private security companies linked to violent crime in KZN'
Experts have warned that the South African police are losing the battle against crime - and that has led those citizens who can afford it to turn to a booming private security industry. "It's not getting better, it is getting worse," said Anton Koen, a former police officer who now runs a private security firm that specializes in tracking and recovering hijacked and stolen vehicles. "The murder rate is the highest in 20 years, violence is getting worse because our justice system seems to be failing us, the public of South Africa."
Anton Koen, a former police officer who now runs a private security firm, patrols east of Johannesburg. Source: AP
There are more than 2.7 million registered private security officers in the country, according to the Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority, making South Africa's security industry one of the largest in the world. That compares with fewer than 150,000 police officers for the country's 62 million people.
Figures from PSIRA show that the number of security businesses in South Africa grew by 43% in the past decade, while the number of registered security officers has increased by 44%. More than 580,000 private security guards are currently active and employed - more than the police and army combined - according to figures from PSIRA.
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But staying safe and avoiding crime is another example of the stark inequality that afflicts South Africa, as only the wealthy few can afford private security services. The majority of South Africans must still rely on an under-resourced and struggling police force.
Violent crime in South Africa has spiked over the past decade after a period when it decreased substantially. There were 27,494 killings in South Africa in the year to February 2023, compared with 16,213 in 2012-2013. South Africa's homicide rate in 2022-2023 was 45 per 100,000 people, compared with a rate of 6.3 in the United States and around 1 in most European countries.
The police say 10,000 new police officers are going into service from the start of 2024, in an effort to reverse the trend. In an indication that police are overwhelmed, local government authorities in the Gauteng province that includes Johannesburg, South Africa's largest city, have recently introduced their own crime wardens to help with law enforcement.
Thomas said that crime "can thrive in an environment where there is a disorganized police force."
The South African Police Service (SAPS) is in perpetual crisis. In research and analysis by Lizette Lancaster of the Institute for Security Studies, the SAPS’ ability to solve murders has declined by 38% in the past decade since 2011/2012, with the result that between 2019 and 2020, detectives were only able to solve 19 out of every 100 murders. In real numbers, that means that police were only able to solve 19% of the 21,325 murders recorded between 2019 and 2020.
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Much has been written about South Africa’s police reform process and the many ways in which it failed, or was wholly ill-prepared and ill-equipped, to contend with its colonial policing origin and violent history. In her 2011 article ‘Challenges to Police Reform in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, Naomi Phillips wrote about the ways in which the SAP struggled to transform itself into the SAPS. She makes the argument that those implementing the transformation and leading the reform process did not believe in either process, and that a rise in violent crime in the 2000s made it difficult for police leadership to convince both the public and individual officers that it was possible to conduct policing in a way that prioritised human rights and was community-oriented, as per the newly adopted Bill of Rights in the Constitution.
In more recent years, security experts and activists working to ensure the equitable distribution of police resources across the country’s informal settlements and suburbs agree that not enough has been done to ensure that police are deployed and given the resources to do their jobs where they are needed most.
To put it simply, South Africans cannot give the police what we do not have. We do not trust them, we think they are corrupt and we are losing faith in the police and many of our public institutions to live up to their mandates, as detailed in the latest round of Afrobarometer public opinion surveys. In addition to this, the annual police budget - which was R97.1 billion (£4.5 billion) in the most recent financial year - has grown by 65.6% since 2012; this represents the largest growth in budget allocation to any national government entity in the past decade.
The path we take forward from here seems to be binary: we either triple-down on reform efforts, or we look for radical solutions in defunding the police or abolishing the police and prison system altogether. But very little in public discourse, politics, or policy is binary. One could easily argue that we have tried, if not exhausted, the reform process and anything we do now must be a radical departure from what we have tried before.
It may be time to view the future of policing in South Africa as the foundation of the future of our country and its democracy. South Africans cannot build their lives and their own futures where they do not feel safe, and the SAPS has no discernible future in a country where it is chronically dysfunctional.
Police organizations are slow to change, and change may not necessarily happen because of new policies and legislation. In South Africa, the challenge to existing police culture came from within. In states transitioning from authoritarianism to democracy, resistance to police abuses can make or break the larger democratic project. “The police not only reflect the nature of the state, but are also responsible for the prevention or promotion of state change,” writes Marks. If the police are not democratized, nobody is.
The South African Police Act of 1995 did outline the “establishment, organization, regulation and control” of post-apartheid policing. But that was just a law. As Marks shows, it took “dissident police groupings,” who defied “existing police practice and frameworks” to force real changes in the culture of the SAPS.
Apartheid-era SAPS did include black police, but, just as in the larger racist society, they were treated as second-class. They received inferior benefits compared to their white counterparts. They were not allowed to arrest whites. They couldn’t rise up into the higher ranks. They were forbidden trade union representation.
By the late 1990s, nearly 70% of the SAPS was Black, meaning “African, Indian or Coloured,” with the last term meaning mixed race in the South African context. Black police were only a small proportion of the upper ranks, however, so 1998 also saw the formation of the Black Officers Forum (BOF) to address the continuing legacy of state racism in management.
Marks notes that racism within American and British police departments, especially the way these police departments have interacted with minority communities, has also been met by black police groups.
| Year | Killings in South Africa |
|---|---|
| 2012-2013 | 16,213 |
| 2022-2023 | 27,494 |
Homicide rates in South Africa.
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