Policing In The New South Africa

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The state police force of South Africa has acquired massive notoriety since its formation. Its officers have developed a reputation for routinely provoking violence and torturing suspects. As the key bastion of apartheid it is in urgent need of change. In Policing for a New South Africa Mike Brogden and Clifford Shearing evaluate the options for change. They critically analyse orthodos policing ideas imported from the West and contrast them with the indigenous model of independent policing from the townships of South Africa itself. Together they offer significant possibilities for the future. Importantly they suggest that rather than South Africans import ideas wholesale from the West, the latter countries, in the light of the failures of their own police systems have much to learn from South Africa.

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.

A country is policed only to the extent that it consents to be. When that consent is withheld, cops either negotiate or withdraw. Once they do this, however, they are no longer police; their role becomes something far murkier. Several months before they exploded into xenophobic violence, Jonny Steinberg travelled the streets of Alexandra, Reiger Park and other Johannesburg townships with police patrols. His mission was to discover the unwritten rules of engagement emerging between South Africa's citizens and its new police force. In this provocative new book, Steinberg argues that policing in crowded urban space is like theatre. Only here, the audience writes the script, and if the police don't perform the right lines, the spectators throw them off the stage. In vivid and eloquent prose, Steinberg takes us into the heart of this drama, and picks apart the rules South Africans have established for the policing of their communities. What emerges is a lucid and original account of a much larger matter: the relationship between ordinary South Africans and the government they have elected to rule them. The government and its people are like scorned lovers, Steinberg argues: their relationship, brittle, moody, untrusting and ultimately very needy.

State police forces in Africa are a curiously neglected subject of study, even within the framework of security issues and African states. This work brings together criminologists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, political scientists and others who have engaged with police forces across the continent and the publics with whom they interact to provide street-level perspectives from below and inside Africa's police forces.

This book explores how social and territorial boundaries have influenced the approaches and practices of the South Africa Police Service (SAPS). By means of a historical analysis of South Africa, this book introduces a new concept, ‘police frontierism’, which illuminates the nature of the relationships between the police, policing and boundaries, and can potentially be used for future case study research. Drawing on a wealth of research, this book examines how social and territorial boundaries strongly influenced police practices and behaviour in South Africa, and how social delineations amplify and distort existing police prejudices against those communities on the other side of the boundary. Focusing on cases of high-density police operations, public-order policing and the recent policing of the COVID-19 lockdown, this book argues that poor economic conditions combined with an increased militarisation of the SAPS and a decline in public trust in the police will result in boundaries continuing to fundamentally inform police work in South Africa. This book will be of interest to scholars and students interested in policing in post-colonial societies characterised by high levels of violence, as well as police work and police militarization.