The president has called on communities to work for peace and stability by volunteering to help their local police. Some are ahead of the game with varying reactions from government
Pierre du Bois
Crime-fatigued South Africans are employing police reservists to protect their towns, despite efforts by police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi to stop them.
Two years ago, Selebi clamped down on Johannesburgers employing trained police reservists, because they were paid by the people whose areas they patrolled. But still, highly successful “bobby on the beat” schemes have mushroomed elsewhere. “This office is not aware of places where such schemes are operational at the moment,” the police media liaison service said this week.
Residents and businessmen of the Boland town of Stellenbosch are paying up to have armed and uniformed police reservists patrol their streets. Usually, police reservists work as unpaid volunteers. The people of neighbouring Somerset West are looking at establishing the Stellenbosch system in their own town.
Selebi closed down a similar scheme in Johannesburg suburbs Parkview, Emmarentia, Parkview and Greenside early in 2000, to the horror of police and residents.
In Stellenbosch police reservists, uniformed, armed, with full powers of arrest and paid by locals began patrolling the CBD in 1997. But at the end of 2000, the scheme spilled over into Stellenbosch suburbs, where people are paying R60 per month for protection.
The Stellenbosch model has landed huge successes, with the crime rate falling drastically in recent years. Police statistics show crime, especially burglaries, has plummeted by as much as 80% in the suburbs where the scheme is operational. As a result, the crime rate in the entire town was over 30% lower last December than the year before.
The Stellenbosch Watch, the non-profit company operating the scheme, employs 104 policemen, with several times more officers and cars on the streets per shift than the local police have.
The company’s unpaid chairman Pieter Venter and other Stellenbosch businessmen looked at the structure of their local police and found there were not enough “foot soldiers” to police pro-actively and hence prevent crime. As a result, police officers weren’t doing much but taking statements from victims of crime.
The company now supplies the necessary patrol officers to combat crime effectively, but the reservists ultimately stand under command of the Stellenbosch police, who train them and deal with disciplinary steps that may have to be taken. The company also buys cars, scooters and bicycles for the reservists.
The town’s police are ecstatic about the scheme. The police station’s spokesman, Anton de Kock, has repeatedly labeled it a “winning recipe”. The secret, according to Venter, is that there is no competition between police and the company.
The company is connected to a related but different scheme in Cape Town. There, paid reservists work under the banner of a City Improvement District (CID), an arrangement that allows residents to have improved services in their neighbourhood if they make a monthly contribution. The Cape Town Partnership also employs 120 police reservists and 30 security guards.
Results have been almost as drastic as in Stellenbosch. Michael Farr, CEO of the Cape Town Partnership, says crime has fallen by 40% in the CBD since the project was launched in 1999. On the outskirts of the CBD, crime was reduced by 20% to 40%, according to Farr. The reservists are paid by businesses in the CBD via the project.
Johannesburgers have also taken their security upon themselves. The Central Johannesburg Partnership has employed security guards in parts of the CBD since the early 1990s. “Any uniformed presence on the street is a deterrent,” says the organisation’s Neil Fraser. But reservists do have advantages. “They have the full right of law behind them. A security guard can only make a civil arrest,” says Fraser.
The police media liaison service says the police object to paid volunteer systems because the Exchequer Act does not make provision for rent-a-cop schemes.
Director Sally de Beer of Jackie Selebi’s office is adamant that a situation where a neighbourhood is paying to employ police reservists for its own protection is unacceptable. “If certain areas want to pay people to be police officers, then obviously the richer suburbs will be able to pay for better policing and the poor people will not be able to.” This, says De Beer, is against the Constitution, which guarantees equal protection for all.
But Hennie Bester, former Western Cape minister for Community Safety, dismisses this argument as a “politically correct, short-sighted approach” and “false”.
Bester believes additional officers allow local police to make greater use of regular manpower, especially when crackdowns are made on Cape Town gangsters. He says it is “very short-sighted of police to be against increasing their resources.”
But initiatives such as the one in Stellenbosch are only an interim solution. One of Bester’s last acts before his term ended was to take the necessary steps that allowed the Cape Town Municipal Police to be founded on December 1 last year. The paid police reservists would eventually work as municipal policemen, accountable to provincial government instead of national.
For now, people in Cape Town and Stellenbosch may employ their own reservists because a special agreement was reached in 1999 between the Western Cape provincial government, Minister of Provincial and Local Government Sydney Mufamadi and representatives of the Community Patrol Board, a non-profit company that set up the project.
But Selebi has apparently also tried to end the Cape initiative. According to Bester, the police commissioner had ordered an immediate end to it in November 2000, but eventually chose to let things be after a showdown with the Western Cape provincial government. He could still stop it, but would have to give six months’ notice under the agreement reached in 2000.
Comment by Selebi’s office read: “An agreement was reached between the Office of the National Commissioner and the Western Cape provincial government on the phasing out of the [rent-a-cop] scheme by June 2003, after the establishment of a municipal police.”
Captain Anton de Kock of the Stellenbosch police says a municipal police force would be too expensive, costing R17-million instead of the R3-million for the current model in Stellenbosch. De Kock hopes the Stellenbosch Watch won’t be shot down. “How are we going to explain it to the community?” he asked. “It costs the police nothing. Why don’t they use Stellenbosch as a flagship?”