For many voters, crime is the key issue of this election, and it is not surprising that political parties have given the matter a bit of thought in preparing their election manifestos. Each party makes some excellent points, but at times the rhetoric descends into simply promising more, better and faster.
One of the common fallacies across parties is the idea that boosting police numbers is paramount in making the country safer. When the South African Police Service (SAPS) woke up to declining personnel levels in 2002, their ambitious plan was to increase total staff, including civilians, to 147 560 by 2005. To generate the massive number of new recruits required by the deadline has required a revamp of the basic training — which we have been assured will have no negative effects on quality.
This growth policy has prompted an absurd bidding war. One of the first salvos of the campaign was fired by the Democratic Alliance, which proclaimed in election posters that it would put 150 000 cops on the streets.
The African National Congress now claims it will produce a SAPS with more than 150 000 police ”in active duty” — presumably uniformed police and detectives — without any specific time horizon. Not to be outdone, the United Democratic Movement claims they can create 40 000 more cops in just three years.
All this misses a fundamental point: it has never been demonstrated anywhere that more police means less crime. While saturation patrolling can reduce some kinds of street crime temporarily, the numbers required to sustain such an operation in the metro areas alone would be prohibitive.
More visible police may, however, impact positively on the public’s perception of whether the police are doing a good job. National victim surveys have demonstrated a clear link in this regard.
The SAPS is indeed understaffed in many areas, but most of these are skilled positions, such as experienced detectives and forensic staff. Gross police staff-to-public ratios are actually quite good in South Africa, about 250 members per 100 000 citizens, comparable to more developed countries like Canada and Australia, as well as to countries with similar crime problems, like Columbia.
Simply cranking out recruits without commensurate field-training officers or vehicles in the receiving stations is futile. All these new police members will take years to season into fully functional staff, and during this time they will need the guidance of experienced colleagues.
More cases generated by more street cops will require more detectives to process, more prosecutors to prosecute, and more jail cells to receive the output. There are limits to the rate at which the criminal justice system can grow.
Aside from this common fixation, the manifestos do contain the seeds of real policy innovation. The ANC’s policy is, in essence, what is presently being done.
The National Crime Combating Strategy entered its second phase in 2004 without much fanfare, but the emphasis now is supposed to be on crime ”normalisation” through sector policing. We will have to wait and see whether this policing philosophy, which requires police to act as community organisers, can be successfully implemented given current skills constraints.
The DA astutely points out the need for comprehensive in-service training, which should be conducted at station level by floating national trainers. It also suggests performance contracts for all employees based on quantifiable indicators.
This is an excellent idea if implemented properly, but it would surely encounter union resistance. They make much of the successes of the Cape Town Metro police, while pointedly ignoring the fact that the Western Cape presently has the worst crime situation in the country.
The Inkatha Freedom Party makes the dubious claim that ”the fight against crime can be won if sufficient money is employed …” It rightly stresses the need for the devolution of power to the local level, an idea that has been mooted for years but which has been over-ridden by the strong interest in central control of the SAPS.
But then they fall victim to the rhetoric of zero tolerance, a policy of arresting even minor offenders on the premise that the aggregate effect of such infractions is an atmosphere of chaos that promotes larger crimes. While zero tolerance can be applied for limited periods of time in small geographic areas, such as neighbourhoods beginning to tip into disarray, even its most staunch advocates would not recommend it as an ongoing national policy.
Both the IFP and the UDM advocate a referendum on the death penalty, which is a cheap way of supporting execution without actually accepting moral responsibility for it.
Unsurprisingly, DA leader Tony Leon has also expressed his personal support for the reintroduction of capital punishment. In virtually every country with a sizable crime problem, the masses support the death penalty, but that is why we have a constitution: to protect the individual from the madness of crowds.
Of course, sentencing murderers and rapists to death is viscerally satisfying, but its effect on crime has been conclusively demonstrated to be nil, the intuitions of law-abiding citizens notwithstanding.
The UDM also suggests the creation of a new crime prevention ministry, which presumably would be equal to and separate from the criminal justice line departments. This is a brilliant idea, and one that is needed to address the impasse of departmental tunnel vision that has scotched South Africa’s social crime- prevention efforts. Placing responsibility for crime prevention within the police, even as a supposed ”lead department”, strangely results in heavily law enforcement-based interventions and the marginalisation of social-service agencies.
The Independent Democrats are, perhaps not surprisingly, on their best ground when discussing rape and the abuse of women. They suggest the creation of a ”common rape protocol” which prescribes minimum treatment standards for rape survivors at all points of their contact with the state.
This rights-based approach would need to be costed, but it is surely a step in the right direction in preventing secondary victimisation. Unfortunately, the rest of their platform is dominated by words like ”greater”, ”stepped up”, and ”far stronger”.
In short, each party has something to recommend it in its crime and justice policy, and one wonders why these gems seem to emerge only when politicians’ jobs are on the line. Collectively, there is clearly the intelligence to make some real progress, if we could get beyond the confines of party politics.