A Citizen S Guide To Crime Trends In South Africa

South Africans care a lot about crime. We think and worry about it, plan and insure against it, develop and share theories about it, read about it, and talk about it... a lot. But how much do we really know? Crime statistics do not belong to the government, academics, specialists, or the press. They are ours: we experience and report crimes and have a right to access and understand their official record. It should not take any particular expertise to get a grasp on what we should make of the figures and graphs that the South African Police Service produces every year. A Citizen's Guide to Crime Trends in South Africa provides a basis on which to understand the statistics in a manner that is accessible to everyone. Each chapter challenges a set of oft-repeated assumptions about how bad crime is, where it occurs, and who its victims are. It also demonstrates how and why crime statistics need to be matched with other forms of research, including criminal justice data, in order to produce a fuller account of what we are faced with.

Policing in South Africa has gained notoriety through its extensive history of oppressive law enforcement. In 1994, as the country’s apartheid system was replaced with a democratic order, the new government faced the significant challenge of transforming the South African police force into a democratic police agency—the South African Police Service (SAPS)—that would provide unbiased policing to all the country’s people. More than two decades since the initiation of the reforms, it appears that the SAPS has rapidly developed a reputation as a police agency beset by challenges to its integrity. This book offers a unique perspective by providing in-depth analyses of police integrity in South Africa. It is a case study that systematically and empirically explores the contours of police integrity in a young democracy. Using the organizational theory of police integrity, the book analyzes the complex set of historical, legal, political, social, and economic circumstances shaping police integrity. A discussion of the theoretical framework is accompanied by the results of a nationwide survey of nearly 900 SAPS officers, probing their familiarity with official rules, their expectations of discipline within the SAPS, and their willingness to report misconduct. The book also examines the influence of the respondents’ race, gender, and supervisory status on police integrity. Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, policing, sociology, political science, as well as to police administrators interested in expanding their knowledge about police integrity and enhancing it in their organizations.

What is the place and role of whites in South African political life today? Are whites genuinely willing participants in a ‘non-racial democracy’, willing to forego the racial privileges of the past or, despite legal equality, have they proved reluctant to relinquish power and continue, as black activists assert, to dominate many aspects of South African society? Building upon the burgeoning body of work on whiteness, this book focuses on how whites have adapted politically to the arrival of democracy and sweeping political change in South Africa. Outlining a variety of responses in how white South Africans have sought to grapple with apartheid’s brutal history, the author shows how their memories of the past have shaped their reactions to political equality. Although the majority feared the coming of democracy, only a right-wing minority actively resisted its arrival. Others chose (and are still choosing) to emigrate, used democracy to defend ‘minority rights’ or have withdrawn into psychologically or physically demarcated social enclaves. Challenging much current thinking, Southall argues that many whites have chosen to embrace the freedoms that democracy has offered, or to adapt to its often disconcerting realities pragmatically. Examining this crucial issue against the historical context of minority rule and its defeat, the author presents a new dynamic to the continuing debate on whiteness in Africa and globally.

'With remarkable courage, insight and access, Mark Shaw takes the reader into the darkest corners of South Africa's ganglands.' – Mandy Wiener The assassination of police investigator Charl Kinnear in Cape Town in 2020 was yet one more in a spate of murders related to the so-called 'guns to gangs' saga, in which state weapons are sold to South Africa's criminal underworld. It began in 2007 when Colonel Christiaan Prinsloo and his cronies began selling thousands of decommissioned police weapons to gang lords. Prinsloo's motive: to fund his son's university fees. The sale of weapons to criminals, which the police service has tried to downplay, has resulted in a killing spree of unprecedented proportions. Cape Town is now one of the most violent places on earth, and in 2019 the army was called in to patrol gang-infested areas. Give us more Guns, based on hundreds of interviews with police, experts and the gangsters themselves, tells the story of this callous crime for the first time. Mark Shaw explores how the guns get into the hands of South Africa's crime bosses and describes the bloodshed that ensues. He also uncovers accounts of rampant corruption within the police and in the state's gun-licensing system, probing the government failure that has been instrumental in arming the country's gangsters.

Bottom-up case studies, drawn from the perspective of ordinary Africans’ experiences with state bureaucracies, structures, and services, reveal how citizens and states define each other. This volume examines contemporary citizens’ everyday encounters with the state and democratic processes in Africa. The contributions reveal the intricate and complex ways in which quotidian activities and experiences—from getting an identification card (genuine or fake) to sourcing black-market commodities to dealing with unreliable waste collection—both (re)produce and (re)constitute the state and democracy. This approach from below lends gravity to the mundane and recognizes the value of conceiving state governance not in terms of its stated promises and aspirations but rather in accordance with how people experience it. Both new and established scholars based in Africa, Europe, and North America cover a wide range of examples from across the continent, including bureaucratic machinery in South Sudan, Nigeria, and Kenya infrastructure and shortages in Chad and Nigeria disciplinarity, subjectivity, and violence in Rwanda, South Africa, and Nigeria the social life of democracy in the Congo, Cameroon, and Mozambique education, welfare, and health in Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burkina Faso Everyday State and Democracy in Africa demonstrates that ordinary citizens’ encounters with state agencies and institutions define the meanings, discourses, practices, and significance of democratic life, as well its distressing realities. Contributors: Daniel Agbiboa Victoria Bernal Jean Comaroff John L. Comaroff E. Fouksman Fred Ikanda Lori Leonard Rose Løvgren Ferenc Dávid Markó Ebenezer Obadare Rogers Orock Justin Pearce Katrien Pype Edoardo Quaretta Jennifer Riggan Helle Samuelsen Nicholas Rush Smith Eric Trovalla Ulrika Trovalla

Winner of the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction A dozen years in the making, The Inheritors weaves together the stories of three ordinary South Africans over five tumultuous decades in a sweeping and exquisite look at what really happens when a country resolves to end white supremacy. Dipuo grew up on the south side of a mine dump that segregated Johannesburg’s black townships from the white-only city. Some nights, she hiked to the top. To a South African teenager in the 1980s—even an anti-apartheid activist like Dipuo—the divide that separated her from the glittering lights on the other side appeared eternal. But in 1994, the world’s last explicit racial segregationist regime collapsed to make way for something unprecedented. With penetrating psychological insight, intimate reporting, and bewitching prose, The Inheritors tells the story of a country in the throes of a great reckoning. Through the lives of Dipuo, her daughter Malaika, and Christo—one of the last white South Africans drafted to fight for the apartheid regime—award-winning journalist Eve Fairbanks probes what happens when people once locked into certain kinds of power relations find their status shifting. Observing subtle truths about race and power that extend well beyond national borders, she explores questions that preoccupy so many of us today: How can we let go of our pasts, as individuals and as countries? How should historical debts be paid? And how can a person live an honorable life in a society that—for better or worse—they no longer recognize?

Despite being one of the world's most vibrant democracies, police estimate between five and ten percent of the murders in South Africa result from vigilante violence. This is puzzling given the country's celebrated transition to democracy and massive reform of the state's legal institutions. Where most studies explain vigilantism as a response to state or civic failure, in Contradictions of Democracy, Nicholas Rush Smith illustrates that vigilantism is actually a response to the processes of democratic state formation. In the context of densely networked neighborhoods, vigilante citizens often interpret the technical success of legal institutions-for instance, the arrest and subsequent release of suspects on bail-as failure and work to correct such perceived failures on their own. Smith also shows that vigilantism provides a new lens through which to understand democratic state formation. Among young men of color in some parts of South Africa, fear of extra-judicial police violence is common. Amid such fear, instead of the state seeming protective, it can appear as something akin to a massive vigilante organization. An insightful look into the high rates of vigilantism in South Africa and the general challenges of democratic state building, Contradictions of Democracy explores fundamental questions about political order, the rule of law, and democratic citizenship.

The U.S. is the world´s biggest jailor and one of the most affluent murderous countries, and yet its citizens pay more taxes to sustain law and order than their European counterparts. Yet, the U.S. has the most data in the world on the use of incarceration and its failure. Its researchers have identified more projects able to prevent violence than the rest of the world put together. Its legislators have access to pioneering data banks on cost effective ways to use taxes to reduce crime. We are left wondering why we cannot implement measures that we know will work, reduce crime, and cost less for law and order. Smarter Crime Control shows how to use recent knowledge and best practices to reduce the extraordinarily high rates of murder, traffic fatalities, drug overdoses, and incarceration, while avoiding the high taxes paid by families for policing and prisons. Providing detailed examples, Irvin Waller offers specific actions our leaders at all levels can take to reduce violence and lower costs to taxpayers. He focuses on how to retool policing and improve corrections to reduce reoffending and crime, while limiting criminal courts. He also shows how programs and investments in various strategies can help those youth on the path to chronic offending avoid the path all together. Waller shows how to get smart on crime to shift the criminal justice paradigm from the failing, outdated, racially biased, and exorbitant complex today to an effective, modern, fair and lean system for safer communities that spares so many victims from the loss and pain of preventable violence. He makes a compelling case for reinvesting what is currently misspent on reacting to crime into smart ways to prevent crime. Ultimately, he demonstrates to readers the importance of reevaluating our current system and putting into place proven strategies for crime and violence prevention that will keep people out of jail and make our streets and communities safer for everyone.