Ted Leggett
The police have promised a “zero tolerance” approach to the Western Cape crisis, a term that has been bandied about a lot lately. There is a growing sense that they are being too soft on criminals, that a concern for human rights has emasculated what was once a potent police service.
“Zero tolerance” sounds sufficiently manly to serve as a rallying point for those who would adopt a “no nonsense” tack on law enforcement, the “nonsense” generally being large parts of the Constitution.
The South African version of the zero tolerance idea was brought here largely by advisers from New York, like Jack Maple, who recently visited these shores at the invitation of the New National Party.
New York has experienced a remarkable decline in crime, attributed by the city’s police to their targeting of “lifestyle offences”, such as begging and vagrancy.
By getting the riff-raff off the street, the theory goes, the general atmosphere of lawlessness is reduced. By enforcing every statute, no matter how minor, respect for the law can be won again.
What advocates of zero tolerance fail to recognise is that New York and South Africa are about as alike as footlongs and boerewors. Both are sausage-shaped meat products, but that’s about where the similarity ends.
New York is concentrated around Manhattan, which is an island. Working with limited space, developers were forced to build up, rather than out. The result is one of the highest population densities in the world – eight million people packed into an area of 515km2.
This means the city’s 38 000 police have a relatively small land mass to patrol, smaller than the Durban metro area. There is virtually a bobby on every street corner.
New York is also one of the wealthiest cities on Earth. The incomes of Americans are not just taxed by the national government, but by their home state and city as well. The high income, property and sales taxes paid by New Yorkers are sufficient to give the New York Police Division (NYPD) an annual budget of $2,4-billion – roughly equal to the budget of the entire South African Police Service.
In addition to their numbers and density, New York police are well paid, with overtime and benefits sufficient to attract a huge pool of applicants for available positions.
There is usually a waiting list a year long of qualified people wanting to become officers. All of them have matric certificates and driver’s licences, and are functionally literate.
Being a cop is a prestige profession in the United States, so much so that many departments require a four-year degree to join the force.
The NYPD drills human rights into the minds of all recruits, and with a good reason: the almighty American lawsuit. A police officer who abuses a citizen in the US can expect himself, his department and the city to be served with legal papers within 24 hours.
There is an entire community of lawyers who work for a percentage of whatever their clients are awarded and who watch every move the NYPD makes.
A strong internal affairs division, under direct pressure from elected officials, is just the mustard on the pretzel.
All this means that New Yorkers can afford to talk about zero tolerance. They can back it up by arresting every litterbug and vandal they come across. They can expect their officers will not misconstrue the tough-guy rhetoric and manhandle the public.
Until South Africa has the capacity to identify a criminal when he is arrested for the umpteenth time, and until human rights become an entrenched part of local culture, we’d probably be better advised to look for guidance from nations more like ours.
This is not to say South Africa has nothing to learn from the New York experience. What the NYPD has shown is that little crimes do make a difference, that they create an atmosphere of lawlessness and impunity that leads to bigger things.
But zero tolerance is about generating a sustained ambience of order, not just responding intensively to crises.
In South Africa, zero tolerance could only practically be applied in heavily patrolled urban areas. Using scarce resources to make sure there are no loiterers in Sandton or drunks on the Durban beachfront will result in the rest of the country being relatively neglected.
The zero tolerance approach has the potential to reinforce a kind of apartheid, between those who have access to the police and those who do not.
While private security firms and the new municipal police forces ensure that the rich continue to be better protected than the poor, it is incumbent on the government to minimise this differentiation. Disguising preferential treatment for the most visible sectors of society as “zero tolerance” is not the way forward.
Ted Leggett is editor of Crime and Conflict Quarterly
January
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