Glenn Hollands
The police leadership got a rough ride when they appeared before the portfolio committee on police in early September and were told to “come back with correct and adequate information.”
Under the spotlight were the police’s 2022/23 annual performance plan and amendments to a complicated bill on constitutional democracy and terrorism.
Chairperson Tina Joemat-Pettersson (ANC) hauled Commissioner Fannie Masemola and Deputy Minister Cassel Mathale over the coals for seemingly trying to change performance targets to fit the reality of emerging crime statistics. Further difficult discussions on the topic continued throughout September.
The exchange, and perhaps also the absence of Police Minister Bheki Cele at this critical moment in South Africa’s resurgent crime wave, illustrates the problem of parliamentary oversight of the police and questionable police use of statistics amid a widely acknowledged crisis of policing in South Africa.
Who the police answer to in South Africa remains unclear but it doesn’t appear to be Parliament, nor our hesitant president.
Faced with a mammoth task of restoring an effective, ethical and community accountable police service, there is some suggestion that citizens and their elected representatives have thrown in the towel.
Some communities have resorted to a more parochial focus on home-cooked solutions – private security, citizen-driven policing and some residual strategy to leverage service from their local police station.
Arguably the best results are achieved when all three strategies enter into some level of co-operative mix.
The official and rhetoric-enhanced models of community policing don’t carry much weight with the public anymore. But it’s interesting that the more innovative strategies for citizen-driven crime prevention are usually rolled out under the auspices of familiar Community Policing Forums (CPF) and Neighbourhood Watches (NHW).
The narratives of how we got here should not be overlooked.
The private security industry is often criticised for profiting from crime, as if crime levels in SA were somehow of their making. The industry itself and the vendors of associated technology tend to use police failings for marketing purposes.
The logic is indisputable but the realisation and its implications remain depressing. Crime and safety experts have long pointed out that services and products geared to personal and household safety promise the world, but often deliver modest or partial solutions.
The SAPS face a devastating reputational problem that no amount of spin around performance plans, partnership and community policing can turn around.
The affluent suburb of Hout Bay within the Cape Town metro is a melting pot for several of these issues. Hout Bay is a dream landscape for anyone wanting to score cheap optical points about inequality.
In all likelihood it’s probably the geography of the valley that places very economically unequal communities into close visual proximity. Crime and violence, usually forced to the low-income perimeter in other South African towns and villages, takes centre stage in Hout Bay.
Unsurprisingly then, Hout Bay has a high-powered organisation to combat crime – the Hout Bay Neighbourhood Watch (HBNW).
The HBNW operates its own crime and safety information centre, Watchcon, with the support of security company Fidelity ADT.
The 2021/22 financial year ended on a bad note for the police when the Covid-19 state of emergency restrictions lifted and crime returned like a vengeful tide.
The police found themselves documenting crime stats that made a mockery of their annual performance plans and medium-term targets. Hout Bay was no exception.
According to SAPS crime statistics, there were 11 murders in the Hout Bay precinct between April and June 2022 – an increase of 120% on the same quarter for the previous year.
There were also 9 cases of rape reported – an increase of 80% on the same quarter in 2021.
While contact crime is on aggregate slightly lower in 2022, Hout Bay continues to have a problem with the most serious violent crimes like rape and murder.
By contrast, property related crime over the same period has generally decreased with the exception of a small increase in burglary at residential premises.
Without further research and evidence, it is hard to attribute these trends. It could be speculated however that Hout Bay’s investment in NHW, private crime prevention programmes and locally developed security apps like Buzzer are paying off in respect of property crime that targets wealthy suburbs.
The same cannot be said of the impact on the serious violent crime that disproportionally afflicts poorer settlements like Imizamo Yethu, Hout Bay Heights and Hangberg.
Privatised policing, safety technologies and community-operated control rooms, even when driven by non-profit companies, do not come cheap. Does this mean that they have no beneficial potential in the most severely crime-afflicted communities and in boosting community policing generally?
A senior SAPS officer who has served Hout Bay for years had not yet tested Buzzer, but felt it was “only in some communities and won’t work for everyone”.
One interpretation of these trends is that affluent communities can look after their safety and security needs, thus releasing more police resources for the rest of the country. The logic is undeniable but it’s hardly a vision of equality that is consistent with our Constitution.
More importantly, it discounts the learning from neighbourhoods where the police, citizens and private security co-operate in pragmatic but often unrecognised partnerships.
Although private and citizen-driven crime prevention programmes are usually designed to service paying clients, the advantages in terms of directed crime responses and coordination, often benefit a wider public.
Jonathan Mills, the CPF chairperson in Fish Hoek, recently led a small CPF delegation to investigate the Hout Bay experience, in particular the Buzzer programme, and came away reasonably optimistic.
Mills points out that technologies like Buzzer have useful ways of recording data on incidents that allow locations and times to be collated and analysed via a hub that is easily accessed.
This concept of community-reported crime supplements the police statistics and is useful in understanding crime patterns. Mills notes that this information can be shared with SAPS to help shape operational responses.
Acknowledging that poorer communities may not have access to these technologies, Mills suggests that a limited number of monitors may still be able to use these platforms to report crime, perhaps by tapping into other social media.
Another benefit highlighted by Mills is the potential to share infrastructure like CCTV. When actively monitored and co-ordinated by a control room, cameras can be very useful to public role-players like police, emergency services and disaster response management.
The best results seem to emerge when private security and innovative citizen-driven programmes accept that they do not replace police services but play a supplementary role. As the Hout Bay NHW notes: “The Hout Bay police worked extremely hard to try and hold back the ever-increasing crime wave but with their limited resources they struggled to control the situation. Reported crime statistics just kept on rising.”
Security and safety technologies like Buzzer have long argued that in fact they are increasingly less private and often respond to threats that do not affect individual clients but the community at large.
This fits the lessons from crime prevention WhatsApp groups where incidents are monitored and responded to by private security.
Many of the reports that elicit a security response come from non-client households and often relate to general neighbourhood threats rather than criminal activity at a specific property.
** Glenn Hollands serves on the Fish Hoek CPF and works in the field of crime and violence prevention
** The views expressed herein are not necessarily those of Independent Media.