There are basically two types of contingency that have elicited international police assistance: transitions from hegemonic to popular rule; and complex emergencies in failed state environments. Both situations have separate and distinct socio-political characteristics, but they are not totally unconnected from the perspective of security sector reform. For example, the stabilisation of an emergency may lead to a transitional situation — or timely transition may avert an emergency situation. During the ‘complex emergency’ stage, however, the problems of stability and order are such that they tend to require levels of coercive power more closely associated with military organisations than police agencies.¹

The past decade has witnessed three major police assistance, or ‘CIVPOL’ missions in Southern Africa, all coupled to broader United Nations peacekeeping operations in Angola, Mozambique and Namibia. It has also borne witness to an incredible democratic transition in South Africa, one that has required significant police transformation even though it did not require a UN peacekeeping presence in the field.

The mission of UN CIVPOL, or the civilian police component of UN peacekeeping, is to "... undertake the supervision or control of local civil police in order to ensure that law and order are maintained effectively and impartially, and that the human rights and fundamental freedoms are fully protected."² Such missions, however, have become increasingly specialised and have begun to focus on assistance with training and other issues that are at the heart of the democratic transformation of criminal justice systems.

While the UN missions in Angola, Namibia and Mozambique provide some valuable insights into the evolution of contemporary CIVPOL operations, South Africa provides a highly informative and complex example of post-conflict peacebuilding. However, the fact that the UN was not involved in peacekeeping in the country tends to obscure some very pertinent lessons for other transitions that require significant assistance with peacebuilding processes. In fact, the relatively peaceful and orderly nature of the South African transition, coupled with the involvement of a relatively vibrant and informed civil society, make South Africa an excellent ‘laboratory’ for analysing approaches to post-conflict reconstruction.

While naturally concerned with police effectiveness and efficiency, international police assistance has aimed primarily at normative transformation — at imparting and inculcating international criminal justice standards. The latter have been refined to include standards appropriate for ‘democratic police’ as opposed to ‘regime police’. Whereas regime police are primarily concerned with what government requires, democratic police are responsive to the needs of the citizenry and are held accountable for their deeds and omissions through multiple political and civil mechanisms.³

According to Bayley, "... institutional changes involving the relations of police to government or other social structures are the most difficult to make."4 These are exactly the type of fundamental reforms that have been attempted in South Africa — changes that affect the purpose, functions, control and accountability of the police. There has also been considerable international assistance with the reform of internal management practices and a fair amount of ‘politically neutral’ technology transfer — but these have little to do with the essence of the peacebuilding task within the sphere of police reform: democratic development and the establishment of a human rights culture in policing.

The aim of this article is to review the process of police transformation in South Africa. After summarising the drivers of police reform, the focus is on the limited efficacy of ‘community policing’ as a basis for normative transformation, as well as that of international assistance with the reform process. This has led to a need to get back to basics with effective law enforcement, and some ideas are proposed for regional collaboration with police reform. It is hoped that this may contribute to the design of more effective future interventions, in Southern Africa and in other countries and regions where criminal justice is in a state of post-conflict transition.

Since the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910, the South African Police (SAP) had the primary task of policing race relations, like any other colonial police force. The SAP specifically had to contain and control black South Africans by keeping them in their place as a subject population. This ‘colonial’ role in subjugating the majority of the population led to an emphasis on militarism within the force, the adoption of universal riot control training and later even the deployment of armoured vehicles. Although not well-funded, the SAP did its job well, by virtue of the political and technological capacity to use maximum force as a first resort.

Throughout, the SAP took its orders from the government of the day, and from 1948 onwards, became the enforcement arm of the infamous apartheid regime. This regime also created a number of nominally independent homelands and autonomous territories that were authorised to raise and direct police forces. The police in territories such as Lebowa and Qwa Qwa were also established in the image of the SAP, with senior officers being recruited from and/or trained by the SAP. Obviously, the majority population did not hold the SAP or its offshoots in high regard. In fact, by the time that the political transition to democracy began in 1990, the SAP had become "... totally committed to the fight against those organisations and people who were committed to ending apartheid ... it was an inefficient and ineffective police force, which had lost the confidence of the South African public."⁵

Thus, while the ‘new’ South Africa inherited a functioning police force of considerable size (close to 140 000) and resources, this had been geared to the needs of the apartheid order. The police were agents of a state that created crimes through its efforts to erect moral, economic and political boundaries between the races, and it was these crimes that received the most attention. The official historian of the SAP has acknowledged that, during the apartheid era, only one in ten members of the force were engaged in detecting and investigating ‘real’ crime. The rest were busy with regime maintenance.⁶

In many respects, the Interim Constitution for the Republic of South Africa, which came into force on 27 April 1994, can be compared to the type of general peace agreement that guided police transformation in Mozambique and Namibia. It provided, for example, fundamental guidelines for the reform of the public service in general, and the ‘security services’ in particular — the police and defence force in existence at the time. In particular, the new Constitution provided for the establishment of a single national police service, instead of the existing eleven agencies.

The motivation behind the establishment of ten ‘Bantu’ homelands within the greater South Africa, each with its own police force, was of course the ideology of ‘grand apartheid’ based on racial and ethnic segregation. The emergent police agencies were therefore dominated by an ethnic political élite and controlled by illegitimate and often overtly corrupt homeland administrations. The amalgamation of the SAP and the ‘homeland’ police forces was thus not only a constitutional prerequisite, it was essential to the process of democratisation within the police agencies.

The Interim Constitution provided the major set of ‘rules’ for the transformation of all state departments. This has been particularly significant for the state’s ‘coercive instruments’ — the police (Department of Safety and Security) and the defence force (Department of Defence). Since 1994, these departments have produced a plethora of policy documents aimed at interpreting the Constitution from the perspectives of departmental norms and actions. Especially the Bill of Rights and the fundamental rights entrenched in Chapter 2 of the Constitution have provided a powerful value framework within which statutory and discretionary powers must be exercised.

The vision of democratic civilian control over the police is also provided by Section 208 of the Constitution, which states that a civilian secretariat for the police service must be established under the responsible minister. Theoretically, this should protect the police from inappropriate interference and control by any one political party.⁷ Accountability was further enhanced by the creation of an Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD) under the Police Act. With substantial investigative powers, the ICD began operating in April 1997, and is considered a crucial tool for civilian control over the South African Police Service (SAPS). It has its own budget and offices, and should prove effective in deterring the abuse of police powers.

The government’s major national policy framework, the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), also exercised a significant influence on the goals of police transformation. With "peace and security for all" as one of its six basic principles, the RDP also determined that the police must be made more representative of the people, more responsive to human rights, and more answerable to the communities which they serve. And, of course, as a sizeable component of the public service, the SAPS is obliged to transform in accordance with the criteria stipulated in the white paper on the transformation of the public service.

However, the new South African state initially had to depend on the same instruments of governance that were used to enforce authoritarian rule — while under immense pressure to ensure more equitable policing and criminal justice for all in the face of rising crime levels. Since 1990, the process of political liberalisation has been accompanied by high levels of crime as social controls were loosened and new opportunities arose for criminal activities. Rising levels of crime are thus related to political, economic and social trends which began before the political transition, but which were accentuated by rapid political reform.

Nearly three years after the election that brought popular rule to South Africans, it was observed that, "[b]eyond its policing function, South Africa’s system of criminal justice is in crisis. If its ability to prevent, process and deter crime is any measure of its effectiveness, then reform of the system is now not only a necessity, but a national priority."⁸ Most types of crime grew steadily from 1990 to 1994, but a continued penchant for violent crime has been the greatest problem. Since 1994, there have been fluctuations in crime rates, but at very high levels. While some see crime trends as ‘stabilising’ at these high levels, it is probably too early to be sure that the worst is over.

The process of changing from a police force to a police service was formally started with the appointment of the National Police Commissioner as head of the SAPS in 1995. The initial structural phase of criminal justice transformation focused on the amalgamation and reorganisation of the eleven different police forces into one national and nine provincial structures. At the operational level, however, a fundamental part of the transformation has been the demilitarisation and civilianisation of the new police service and the attempt to introduce an ethos of ‘community policing’.

According to the National Police Commissioner, the transformation of the police has been managed in three distinct but overlapping phases, described as follows:

Phase 1: Rationalisation — to ensure effective administration at national and provincial levels of government as prescribed by the Constitution;



Phase 2: Amalgamation — the physical amalgamation of the various existing policing agencies into one national police service; and



Phase 3: Change — the transformation of the SAPS into a "... professional, representative, efficient and effective, impartial, transparent and accountable service ... [which] ... upholds and protects the fundamental rights of all people, and which carries out its mission in consultation and co-operation with the needs of the community."⁹

The mechanics of phases 1 and 2 (rationalisation and amalgamation) have been legislated in a new South African Police Service Act (No 68 of 1995, promulgated on 4 October 1995) that provides for the establishment, organisation, regulation and control of the SAPS. Although community policing was also legislated, the objective for phase 3 (change) reads like a wish list that would elude even established democracies.

Prior to the April 1994 elections, a significant amount of research had been done on policing the post-apartheid South African society — by universities, various political parties, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the SAP itself. The consensus that seemed to emerge, was that South African should develop a model or style of community policing much like that found in developed democracies. Community policing, which was the prevailing buzzword in the international policing debate, therefore became the dominant theme underlying the process of police transformation that was initiated by the new government.

Even in developed democracies, however, the advocacy of community policing is underpinned by a long-running debate over different models and styles of policing which tend to be aligned on the axis of force versus service, or control versus care. In the former mode, police responsibilities centre around crime control and the maintenance of order; while in the latter the emphasis is on the service functions that the police may provide in terms of protection against crime, victim support and the safeguarding of citizen’s rights. Community policing leans towards this second style of policing.¹⁰

According to the official SAPS handbook, "[c]ommunity policing can be defined as a philosophy or approach to policing which recognises the interdependence and shared responsibility of the police and the community in making South Africa a safer, more peaceful and more liveable country. Community policing aims to establish an active and equal partnership between the police and the public through which crime and community safety issues can be jointly determined and solutions designed and implemented."¹¹

By September 1997, approximately 1 200 community police forums (CPFs) and sub-forums had been established at the 1 221 police stations nationwide. This was supposed to bring the police and the community closer together. Although community policing had been officially declared the new policing style and philosophy of the police service, the relationship between community policing and democratic policing was never explained in the necessary detail to police personnel.¹² The fact that members of the infamous Security Branch were initially used to introduce community policing lends credence to this observation.

There is a strong feeling that community policing has concentrated too heavily on the creation of CPF structures and gaining legitimacy for the SAPS, rather than improving the outcomes of policing in terms of better detection and crime reduction. Concerns have also been expressed that too many CPFs have seen their role as one of control and direction of the police rather than as one of providing the community link in the chain of police accountability. Moreover, neither community associations nor the SAPS seem to have grasped the fact that there is more to community policing than establishing community forums.¹³

There is also some doubt whether the whole concept of community policing can work effectively in disparate and divided communities — such as many in South Africa — that have little in common in terms of needs and aspirations. While the more affluent white areas may still support community-driven solutions to crime, black people in poorer areas would prefer to see intervention by national government and more effective policing.¹⁴ It is a simple fact that community policing can only really be effective when the community has the relevant skills and resources to contribute to the fight against crime. These are patently lacking in the rural and poorer areas of the country.

Many believe that CPFs are controlled by the police, and the public and the police themselves frequently see community policing as a soft approach to the problem of crime. However, there is not necessarily a contradiction between greater police accountability to the citizenry and effective crime control. In the light of the brutal history of policing in South Africa, a police force more responsive to community needs was perhaps not only an appropriate strategy to fight crime, but also an essential one for ensuring a legitimate police agency.

Continued political violence in certain areas of the country (such as rural KwaZulu-Natal), and the emergence of gang-warfare and vigilantism in the Cape peninsula suggest that community policing strategies will not easily take root where more robust law enforcement methods are needed to police the conflict in the short term. Nevertheless, the SAPS stuck to the notion of community policing — spurred on by the pundits in the research and NGO sector and the attentions of some powerful international donors.

With the advent of democratic rule, South Africa began to enjoy new access to a wide variety of foreign donor assistance packages. In particular, developmental assistance in the sector of governance and democratisation has flourished, and the "... deployment of technical experts to assist in crime prevention and criminal justice reform has become an almost routine feature of the exchange relations cemented under both bi-lateral and multi-lateral agreements."¹⁵ Since 1994, South Africa has enjoyed significant donor assistance across the core departments of the criminal justice system, namely Justice (including juvenile justice), Safety and Security, Welfare and Correctional Services.

While some donors consciously strive towards a fairly even spread of assistance across core departments, others seem to have clear preferences for certain departments and sectors. For example, US assistance is concentrated on the training of specialist law enforcement agencies, while the Dutch have a clear preference for the field of juvenile justice. This phenomenon may be explained in terms of differing expertise in specific fields, differing national priorities, networks between individuals and institutions that influence investment decisions, and the relative skill of departments and sectors in capturing the attention of donors.

The Department of Safety and Security has been relatively well-funded compared to the other criminal justice departments. Within the Department, three main sectors are recipients of donor funding: the Secretariat for Safety and Security, the SAPS and the ICD. Some idea of the nature and extent of donor assistance to the Department of Safety and Security can be gleaned by looking at the assistance provided by a few of the major donor countries.¹⁶

For example, Belgium provides significant assistance for the restructuring of the police through an agreement signed in 1995 for a five-year programme of support for the design and development of community policing, public order policing, and the combat of serious and organised crime. The project is worth R 20 480 000.

In addition to its considerable funding of justice projects, the government of Denmark also supports a number of projects within Safety and Security, such as:

financial support of about R1 million for ‘train the trainers’ programmes at SAPS colleges;



some R3 million support for a policing project at the University of Witwatersrand’s Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation;



financial support to the tune of about R1,4 million to the National Secretariat for the printing and distribution of community policing booklets; and



technical assistance to the ICD from June 1997 to July 1998 through a R1,1 million grant.

Sweden has made a heavy investment in human rights and democracy training for the SAPS, spending some R1,9 million on workshops and training materials from 1995-1998. A budget of about R2 million has been proposed for a project aimed at creating ‘model police stations’, and there is a proposal for a project on gender equity within the SAPS that carries a preliminary budget of R1,2 million. Sweden provided technical assistance to the value of R434 700 for the drafting process for the Department’s white paper during 1997.

The United Kingdom has focused its assistance more squarely on basic police training and support for community policing. A UK and Commonwealth Advisory Team helped the SAPS to develop a new basic level training programme (BLTP) during 1995. Together with the evaluation conducted in 1996, this support was worth some R12 million. Even more impressive has been the support for community policing projects in four of the provinces, with a combined value between 1995-1998 of some R56 million.

Other significant bilateral funders of police reform in South Africa are Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States. At the intergovernmental level, the Commonwealth, the European Union and Commission, and the United Nations have also been active supporters of police transformation. Since 1994, for example, the UN has funded Safety and Security projects to the value of some US $1,8 million, or approximately R10,8 million.

While the above type of support for police and justice reform has been most welcome, there are also some clear indications that scarce resources are not always used to best effect due to perennial problems of co-ordination and management of externally-funded projects within and between core criminal justice departments. The lines of authority across departments and between provincial and national government are not clearly demarcated when it comes to securing and implementing donor-assisted projects. The co-existence of multiple co-ordinating structures is further complicated by the preference of some donors for provincial or local points of intervention.

On the other hand, line managers within departments generally lack the strategic management skills to assess organisational needs critically and to discern between more or less suitable donor-assisted programmes that are on offer. This means that donor-assisted projects are not always integrated into the mainstream of organisational transformation and that project sustainability cannot be guaranteed.¹⁷ A similar point can be made for the considerable amount of donor-assisted projects that are channelled through the NGO sector, often in the form of consultancies or contracted research in the interests of the Department of Safety and Security. The capacities thus built, tend to remain outside the mainstream of the police bureaucracy.

Despite the wide spread of donor-funded assistance, South Africa’s criminal justice system, which includes the departments of Safety and Security, Justice and Correctional Services, has never been a unified one. The links between the various departments have been weak and the involvement of other departments that also have roles to play in the prevention of crime is minimal.

The National Crime Prevention Strategy (NCPS) was adopted by Cabinet during May 1996 as an ‘overarching vehicle of police reform’. The NCPS was intended to address the lack of co-ordination and interdepartmental linkages in the fight against crime through a "... comprehensive multi-agency approach to crime prevention."¹⁸ Like many ‘expert’ treatises on transformation in South Africa, however, the document is long on analysis, but very short on practical solutions.

The NCPS is supposed to influence the operations of the departments of Safety and Security, Justice, Correctional Services, Welfare, Defence, Intelligence, Health and Education through, among others, the creation of new co-ordination structures that include joint decision-making by directors-general and ministers of these ‘NCPS departments’.¹⁹ According to official policy, the NCPS has the following main objectives and components:

the co-ordination and integration of criminal justice functions, primarily through the Integrated Justice System (IJS) project, which is designed to improve the management and processing of information pertaining to criminal cases;



improved co-ordination and leadership, involving several departments and actors, to address high priority crime areas; notable success have been achieved through this approach in the realm of border control and the combating of vehicle theft; and



the encouragement of research, advocacy and facilitation of crime prevention programmes.

The strategy aims to draw together key roleplayers in government in an attempt to provide the basis for the restructuring of the criminal justice system, and in the longer term, more effective crime prevention programmes. However, the great strength of the NCPS — its inclusive and comprehensive nature — is also its greatest potential weakness. The very complexity and holistic nature of the strategy suggests that it is doomed to failure unless very strong co-ordination and leadership are available. Without this, the strategy simply becomes a reflection of a wide variety of programmes that may, in any event, have evolved in one form or the other.²⁰

At a different level of analysis, the crime prevention strategy did indicate a significant shift in the discourse on safety and security in South Africa. The focus changed from community policing (which is barely mentioned in the NCPS document), to ‘crime prevention’ and the building of ‘partnerships’, both between government agencies and with outside organisations in business and civil society in an effort to stem the tide of crime.²¹ From the perspective of normative democratic police reform and effective law enforcement practices, however, ‘crime prevention’ and ‘partnerships’ are even further from addressing the basic needs of policing than community policing.

Moreover, by the end of 1997, government had realised that co-ordination in itself is no panacea for success: " ... improvements here will not in themselves solve internal problems of capacity. The effectiveness of the justice system relies not only on co-ordination, but also on the success of individual departments in performing their line function responsibilities."²² Even within individual departments, however, there is a huge gap between the ability to formulate policies and departmental capacity to implement these as part of the line function.

A major part of the problem lies in the nature of policy formulation itself, which has thus far mainly been entrusted to consultants and ‘specialists’ from outside the departments. The latter often have little understanding of the nature of bureaucracy, which means that new policies are often outside the realm of the acceptable and the achievable. The internal policy capacity of the Department of Safety and Security started to develop during 1996, with new appointments being made to relevant posts in the National Secretariat for Safety and Security. However, these incumbents also seem to have been selected for their strategic management skills, and not for their knowledge and experience of policing. The new policies that have been made and accepted by the Department, while visionary and creative, have therefore failed to address issues in sufficient detail to provide clear guidelines for action. According to the Department’s own assessment, the formulation of Safety and Security Policy has generally been at a "... high theoretical level."²³

It is not surprising, therefore, that despite major investments in the NCPS and in community policing projects, crime rates have continued to increase, as has public concern about safety and security. Concomitantly, there has been a decrease in public confidence in the police and a strong outcry for government to ‘do something’ about crime.²⁴ Very much aware of the general elections looming during 1999, this has spurred government to shift its emphasis to a search for policies that will lead to better crime prevention and the more effective combating of crime. Hence, the new white paper on policing strongly emphasises the need for effective law enforcement and "... an investment in, and focus on, the institutions which are essential to show that the state can, and will, act against criminals."²⁵ The drafters of this policy document clearly did not have CPFs in mind.

The new policy paper pays significant attention to the ‘strategic focus areas’ of law enforcement and social crime prevention. While the latter has a strong developmental slant, the former is the core of international police assistance. The major focus areas of law enforcement in a democracy are, in turn, improved criminal investigations, active visible policing, and service to victims. Criminal investigations are to be improved by a number of specific interventions, such as increasing the number of detectives relative to the case load and better detective training programmes.²⁶

The new emphasis on law enforcement in a democracy and in enhanced detective management and training offers scope for sound investments by donors who wish to assist with meaningful capacity-building projects within the SAPS. It is not only detective training that offers scope for solid reform initiatives, but the whole area of basic police training itself.

Despite the considerable potential of training and retraining courses as transformation vehicles, very little has been accomplished in this domain — beyond, of course, still more investigations and reports on what should be done. For example, a comprehensive review and report on improved basic training for the integrated police services was followed by only one intake of recruits for training in 1995, and then a three-year hiatus in recruitment and basic police training.²⁷ There is also some concern about the sustainability of the new Basic Level Training plan and about the fact that the new training initiatives were not built upon once recruits were assimilated into normal policing.²⁸

International assistance should therefore specifically target the training and education of present and future members of the SAPS — not only in detective work, but also in basic law enforcement skills and international policing standards. It is really only when members of the SAPS feel and act like competent and professional law enforcement officers that they will start making a dent in the crime problem and earn the respect of the public. It is also at the level of basic skills training and fundamental education that the greatest opportunities exist for regional training co-operation in Southern Africa — and it is heartening to note that some progress has already been made in this area.

The need for co-operation among police institutions in the Southern African region arises from permeable borders and their concomitant accessibility to organised crime, rather than an overt desire to promote democratic policing standards. However, the re-admittance of the South African police to the International Criminal Police Organisation (Interpol) in 1993 symbolised the return to international acceptance of the police of the former pariah state after decades of isolation. It also represented the start of increased levels of co-operation and collaboration among police agencies in the region.

The SAPS is now represented both in Harare (where a Sub-Regional Interpol Bureau was established in 1995) and at the Interpol General Secretariat in Lyons. Police liaison officers have also been deployed at a number of embassies in the region, such as in Mozambique, Namibia and Swaziland. Further afield, there are personnel in Ghana and the United Kingdom. The Pretoria office of Interpol has been involved in cases necessitating the extradition of suspects wanted for serious offences to countries such as the UK, Australia, Germany, Denmark, Portugal, Malawi, Zimbabwe, the US and Hungary.²⁹

In August 1995, the Southern African Regional Police Chiefs Co-ordinating Organisation (SARPCCO) was created by the police chiefs of eleven Southern African countries (Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe). The role of SARPCCO needs to be understood within the broader context of other structures concerned with security co-operation within the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and its Inter-State Defence and Security Committee (ISDSC). The ISDSC functions through three subcommittees: Defence, Public Security and State Security. The Public Security subcommittee has a range of co-ordination functions, mostly related to cross-border crime, which includes vehicle theft, drug trafficking, and the smuggling of light weapons.

Nominally, SARPCCO acts as the ISDSC subcommittee on Public Security. The primary objective of SARPCCO is to "... promote, strengthen and perpetuate co-operation and foster joint strategies for the management of all forms of cross-border and related crimes with regional implications."³⁰ As far as principles and values are concerned, the Constitution of SARPCCO refers to "... respect for national sovereignty; equality of police services; non-political professionalism; mutual benefit to all members; observance of human rights; non-discrimination of working methods and mutual respect and goodwill."³¹ Importantly, the Constitution also makes provision for the formulation of training policies for the region as the need may arise (albeit from operational exigencies, and not the demands of democratic policing).

Specifically, the Training Sub-committee of SARPCCO aims "[t]o upgrade and enhance the level of expertise and competencies in policing skills within the SARPCCO Region by the year 2000, particularly focusing on the prevention, detection and investigation of cross border crimes."³² If effective, the SARPCCO Training Sub-committee may play a key role in enhancing the standard of police institutions in Southern Africa. However, there are still significant obstacles to the efficacy of regional training initiatives.³³

Beyond SARPCCO and Interpol, a significant portion of policing activity across borders is formalised through bilateral agreements around specific issues. For example, South Africa signed bilateral agreements with Mozambique and Swaziland in 1995 for the purpose of exerting control over the circulation of illegal weapons in the region. Such agreements have enabled the launching of joint operations, such as the highly successful Rachel operations in Mozambique, involving joint arms control search and destroy missions by regional police agencies.³⁴

The promotion and improvement of bilateral, functional co-operation among the countries of the region, as well as multilateral, co-operative, operational and training ventures under the auspices of Interpol and SARPCCO offer as yet largely unrecognised opportunities for promoting democratic police reform. For example, military co-operation in the realm of peacekeeping training had a positive spin-off when SARPCCO presented the first regional United Nations Police Officers Course in Pretoria during November 1998.³⁵ The core of this (and other) UN CIVPOL courses is the internalisation of international criminal justice standards and respect for human rights. The institutionalisation and expansion of such courses in the SADC region would go a long way to spread the message of democratic policing standards.

South Africa has embarked upon an ambitious programme of police reform based on the ‘democratic policing model’. The process is ongoing, and it is too early to make pronouncements of success or failure in certain key performance areas. However, the experiment has proceeded far enough for a few basic conclusions to be drawn. For example, it is clear that there is a big difference between understanding how to police conflict and how to police crime (although the boundaries between political violence and violent crime have been blurred for a time in South Africa — a factor which has further complicated criminal justice reform).

It is often said that South Africa is blessed with a strong NGO culture and a number of academics who are well versed in crime and policing issues. This may have enriched the debate on policing reform in the country, but there are limits to what can be achieved through advisors and consultants — whether these are local or foreign, exogenous to the organisation or employed in new departmental structures. The laws of bureaucratic inertia still operate in the post-conflict environment and nothing short of a total purge and rebirth will nullify this fact. Sometimes, this basic truth is lost when donor-driven projects and experts from the business world are brought in to ‘fix’ government departments in transition. Investments are needed to educate serving police officers in policy formulation and strategic management within the unique professional and bureaucratic environment of the police agency concerned. Without this type of intervention, the gap between policy formulation and policy implementation is bound to remain frustratingly wide.

One basic fact is that more can be done about the problem of police reform if accurate information is available. Where the problem is one of combating or preventing crime, then reliable crime statistics are needed — on the nature of crime, where and how it is committed, for example. But when the problem is one of reconstructing the entire notion of the way in which society is policed, then a lot more is needed than this. Information is needed on criminals, on victims, and on those who police them. The ISS has done some pioneering work with victimisation surveys. The latter have revealed vast differences in the nature, extent and effects of crime according to inequalities in class and culture and the rural/urban dichotomy. The results of such surveys also cast doubt on the efficacy of donor-assisted programmes of reform that are based on Western models of policing.

Despite progress with victim surveys, there is still a dearth of knowledge on local police qua police (and justice and prison workers for that matter). When advocating reforms, there is thus a need to revisit the sociology of the police. Whereas international experiments with military transformation during the 1970s and 1980s were informed by a substantial body of dedicated research in the realm of military sociology, the same has not been true of police reform. Some basic sociological research findings may just make a mockery of the more exulted police transformation goals set by consultants.

It should be remembered that the police and policing are merely the front end of the criminal justice system. Without sufficient and adequately trained prosecutors, magistrates and prison staff, it does not make much sense to arrest people for crimes. International assistance with police reform therefore needs to be integrated with assistance provided for the development of an independent judiciary and an effective penal system. It is especially in this realm — the realisation of the need for an integrated approach to criminal justice reform — that the South African experience potentially has the most to offer scholars and practitioners concerned with criminal justice reform in other societies.

This article is published in support of Training for Peace, a project sponsored by Norway and executed by the ISS in partnership with the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs and the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes. It borrows from a paper by the author entitled Peacebuilding in Southern Africa: Police reform in Mozambique and South Africa, presented at a conference on International Support for Police Reform in Transitions from War to Peace, hosted by the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs, Oslo, 5-6 March 1999.

For a discussion of the concept of ‘international law enforcement’ with the military instrument, see M Malan, ‘Peace enforcement’: The real peace support challenge in Africa, African Security Review, 7(5), 1998.



United Nations, United Nations Civilian Police Handbook, UN DPKO, New York, 1995, pp. 9-10.



For an elaboration of the concept of ‘democratic policing’, see D H Bayley, The contemporary practices of policing: A comparative view, in National Institute of Justice Workshop Series, Civilian Police and Multinational Peacekeeping — A Role for Democratic Policing, US Department of Justice, Washington DC, 1997, pp. 4-7.



D H Bayley, Who are we kidding? Or developing democracy through police reform, in US Department of Justice, Policing in Emerging Democracies: Workshop Papers and Highlights, NIJ Research Report, October 1995, <www.ncjrs.org/txtfiles/167024.txt>.



K Biddle, I Clegg & J Whetton, Evaluation of ODA/DFID support to the police in developing countries: Synthesis study, draft report, University of Wales, October 1998.



M Dippenaar, The history of the SAP: 1913 to 1987, Promedia, Silverton, 1988.



In practice, however, ANC members have been appointed to almost all key posts in the Secretariat.



M Shaw, South Africa: Crime in transition, ISS Papers, 17, Institute for Security Studies, Halfway House, March 1997.



J G Fivaz, Status report: Transformation of the South African Police Service, 7 November 1996, pp. 5-6.



Biddle, Clegg & Whetton, op. cit., p. 11.



National Secretariat for Safety and Security, Guidelines on community policing, 1996, p. 4.



Draft document (2) of the White Paper Chapter Working Group 1, Analysis and recommendations on: The strengths and weaknesses of, and the threats and opportunities to the Department in relation to its external environment (1998-2003), 12 September 1997, p. 7.



Biddle, Clegg & Whetton, op. cit.



See A Louw & M Shaw, Stolen opportunities: The impact of crime on South Africa’s poor, ISS Monograph Series, 14, Institute for Security Studies, Halfway House, July 1997.



E van der Spuy, J Geerlings & A Singh, Donor assistance to crime prevention and criminal justice reform: South Africa, 1994-1998, report commissioned by the National Crime Prevention Secretariat, July 1998, p. 1.



Presented in alphabetical order, rather than order of magnitude or perceived importance. This is merely a capita selecta of donor projects with a fairly high known monetary value. Some meaningful projects involving in-kind assistance will therefore be omitted. For a more complete picture of the extent of donor assistance across core justice departments, see ibid.



Ibid., p. 62.



Department of Safety and Security, White paper on Safety and Security: In service of safety 1998-2003, September 1998, p. 11.



Ibid.



M Shaw, Reforming South Africa’s criminal justice system, IDP Papers, 8, Institute for Defence Policy, Halfway House, August 1996.



Ibid.



White Paper on Safety and Security, op. cit., p. 11.



Department of Safety and Security, Briefing document for workshop on ANC policy conference, 1998.



See, for example, crime trends in the NEDCOR/ISS Crime Index, 2(1 & 2), 1998.



White Paper on Safety and Security, op. cit., p. 12.



Ibid., pp. 15-17.



See Basic Training for the South African Police: The First Report of the International Training Committee to the Police Board, 1993.



Biddle, Clegg & Whetton, op. cit.



E van der Spuy, Regionalism in policing: From lessons in Europe to developments in Southern Africa, African Security Review, 6(6), 1997.



SARPCCO, Constitution, Article 3.1(a).



Ibid., pp. 7-8.



SARPCCO, Report on activities of Training Sub-committee, presented during the Second Summit of SARPCCO, Cape Town, 28-29 July 1997, p. 10.



All regional projects within SADC co-ordinating mechanisms are constrained by a severe lack of resources and finances. There is also an unwillingness among individual police agencies in the region to embark on thorough public appraisals of their training needs.



The evolution of these operations is documented in M Chachiua, Arms Management Programme: Operations Rachel 1996-1999, ISS Monograph, 38, Institute for Security Studies, Pretoria, June 1999.



The first regional UN Police Officers Course (UNPOC), in preparation for Exercise Blue Crane, was conducted from 4-14 November 1998. Over thirty students from twelve SADC countries participated in the course. The training was facilitated by the ISS on behalf of SARPCCO and presentations were made by experienced police officers from Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Canada. The core training faculty was augmented by an officer from the United Nations Civilian Police Unit, the Regional Representative of the UNHCR, and a senior police officer seconded to the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs. UNPOC had been preceded, in August, by a regional planning workshop in Pretoria which was sponsored by Norway (R135 000) through the Training for Peace project at the ISS. Norway also contributed R156 000 towards the regional UNPOC, while Sweden provided R215 000 for the November training.

The police officers who graduated from the regional UNPOC were recalled for participation in Blue Crane during April 1999, as were the instructors from the various countries that supported UNPOC.