Crime-combating strategies should be decentralised and province-specific, the South African Institute for Race Relations said on Tuesday.
Researcher Kerwin Lebone said the institute advocated the decentralisation of crime-fighting strategies following the release of a report on crime across the provinces.
”At the moment we have a National Crime Prevention Strategy … when you look at different categories of crime across the country there is no overriding trend,” he said.
The report was compiled by analysing the official crime statistics released by the South African Police Service in 2006.
The crimes described as most serious by the institute, including murder, attempted murder, rape and armed robbery, were analysed and then broken down according to provinces.
The incidence of armed robbery is twice as high in Gauteng than any other province and the Western Cape is the most ”dangerous” with 59 murders per 100 000 people.
The Limpopo province recorded the lowest murder rates and it was the only province where armed robberies were in decline.
”… a one-size-fits-all approach to crime prevention was not a suitable crime-fighting strategy … decentralisation of management control of the police should be strongly considered,” said Lebone.
Senior researcher for the Crime and Justice Programme at the Institute for Security Studies, Dr Johan Burger, said there can never be a province-specific strategy without an overriding national strategy.
”I agree with it to an extent but the provincial strategy must form part of a national strategy,” he said.
The national strategy should provide a broad outline and that strategy should be flexible enough to allow for province-specific strategies.
This approach ties in neatly with intelligence-driven crime-combating operations, he said.
Burger said in his experience there was little indication that provinces were allowed the flexibility to ”do their own thing”. — Sapa