Suchergebnisse

Abstract
In the early 2000s, many police forces in England and Wales set up independent advisory groups (IAGs) following an inquiry into the flawed investigation of the murder of a black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, by London's Metropolitan Police. Members of IAGs were to act as critical friends of the police providing independent advice on policies, procedures and practices, thus ensuring that no section of their local community was disadvantaged through a lack of understanding, ignorance or mistaken beliefs. Based on a case study of an IAG in an English police force, this article reviews the operation of IAGs following the radical changes made to police governance by the introduction of directly elected police and crime commissioners (PCCs). Its main argument is that more thought needs to be given to the role of IAGs in this new landscape and urgent steps taken to clarify their relationships with police forces and PCCs.

Fifty-two years separate the fatal shootings by police of 69 anti-apartheid protestors at Sharpeville on 21st March 1960 and of 34 striking miners at Marikana on 16th August 2012. The parallels between the two 'massacres' are easy to overstate; but both involved the use of lethal violence by the police against people taking part in insurrectionary action. Drawing on Marenin's (1982) work on the relative autonomy of the police, this paper argues that events at Marikana have to be seen in the context of South Africa's failure to tackle the structural violence of apartheid and the use of direct, personal violence by the police before and since the country became a constitutional democracy in 1994.

Only rarely do inquiries into policing investigate the social context within which it takes place. This article looks at two inquiries which chose to take on this task: Lord Scarman's into the Brixton Disorders in London in April 1981; and Justice Catherine O'Regan and Advocate Vusumzi Pikoli's into the current state of policing in Khayelitsha in the Western Cape. It argues that they should be applauded for doing so but draws attention to how difficult it can be to persuade governments to address the deep-rooted social and economic problems associated with crises in policing rather than focus on reforming the police institution, its policies, procedures and practices.

Only rarely do inquiries into policing investigate the social context within which it takes place. This article looks at two inquiries that chose to take on this task: Lord Scarman's into the Brixton disorders in London in April 1981; and Justice Kate O'Regan and Advocate Vusi Pikoli's into the current state of policing in Khayelitsha in the Western Cape. It argues that they should be applauded for doing so, but draws attention to how difficult it can be to persuade governments to address the deep-rooted social and economic problems associated with crises in policing rather than focus on reforming the police institution, its policies, procedures and practices.

Although the Farlam Commission of Inquiry is yet to report, it has been widely assumed in the blogosphere, across large sections of the traditional media, and in some preliminary academic analyses too, that the shootings at Marikana on 16 August 2012 are symptomatic of a police force in thrall to a political elite intimately connected to international capital and increasingly corporatised and unrepresentative trade unions. Against this background, this article looks to the notion of 'relative autonomy', considered in a classic discussion of 'the concept of policing in critical theories of criminal justice' by Otwin Marenin, to suggest that critics of the SAPS should not be surprised if, in moments of crisis, the police act as the agents of 'specific domination' rather than as guarantors of a 'general order'. It will go on to argue that, even if their worst fears are confirmed by Farlam, their conclusion about the nature of the relationship between the SAPS and a political elite may be too sweeping. Using insights from recent studies of everyday policing, it will suggest that the way in which the police respond to strikes, service delivery protests and other politically charged incidents may tell us surprisingly little about what officers actually do, and why they do it, in the course of their everyday interactions with individual citizens and interest groups less politically well-connected than the main protagonists at Marikana. In conclusion it is argued that, in the absence of significant social change to remedy the structural inequalities bequeathed by apartheid, the SAPS has not been able to transcend its colonial inheritance, leaving the business of police reform begun over 20 years ago unfinished.

A framework for analysing policy transfer developed by David Dolowitz and David Marsh has begun to attract the attention of criminologists interested in understanding how crime policies travel. This article uses this framework to assist in tracing the genealogy of a style of local, geographically responsible `sector' policing which is currently being implemented by the South African Police Service. After locating sector policing as a distinctive approach within the broader tradition of community policing, the article considers the origins and development of geographically responsible policing in Great Britain and the United States before focusing on its adoption and adaptation in post-apartheid South Africa. Answers to the seven questions suggested by Dolowitz and Marsh's framework are then sought in an effort to understand more fully the genealogy of sector policing in South Africa and the role of international policy transfer in it.

Crime has gained an extraordinary pre-eminence among the social problems of our age, and preventing it has become a priority for many governments around the world. This has led to some significant normative disagreements about the relationship between crime prevention and social policy. Different bodies of work warn against both the 'criminalization of social policy' and the 'socialization of crime prevention'. The more integrated notion of 'social police' put forward 200 years ago by Patrick Colquhoun, and the complex relationships between crime prevention, social policy and development that emerge from policy documents published in South Africa since 1994, suggest that, under certain circumstances, crime prevention may indeed be a legitimate goal of social policy, but that a principled approach to deciding its relative priority in the development process is needed if crime is not to be allowed to trump all other social problems.