Antony Altbeker
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/ 20 September 2007

What if apartheid didn’t do it?

”One reason the apartheid-did-it explanation doesn’t completely satisfy is that South Africans are not unique in the world in having gone through long periods of disenfranchisement, oppression and collective violence.” Antony Altbeker looks at some of the weaknesses of an argument that relies only on our history to explain present crime levels.

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/ 6 June 2006

Think again, commissioner

Appearing before Parliament last month, Police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi suggested that the time had come to close down the Independent Complaints Directorate, a watchdog agency set up in the first blush of democracy, when notions like civilian oversight of the police were in fashion.

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/ 16 February 2006

Crime: So little bang for our bucks

”South Africa, as most everyone knows, has a lot of crime. What fewer people appreciate is that, at about 3% of gross domestic product (GDP), the R50billion we’ll spend on criminal justice in 2006/07 is about three times more than the international average,” writes Antony Altbeker, senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies.

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/ 23 September 2005

Change is fear

When ministers, spin doctors and police officers talk about crime, one is often struck by their tone of exasperation. They have what they believe to be a genuinely good news story — that crime is coming down — but the public simply refuses to believe it.