The issues outlined above confirm the assessment, in the department of safety and security’s white paper, that reducing crime in South Africa’s rural areas requires an informed approach different to that practiced in the urban areas.

The primary focus of any new approach should be on enhancing policing in these areas as this, arguably, is likely to have the greatest impact in the short to medium term.

This is because any participatory crime reduction strategy — which could only be based on the assumptions that inform urban strategies, as these are the only models currently available — is unlikely to make a significant difference to levels of safety in rural areas in the short to medium term.

Such strategies correctly aim at producing solutions broader than policing to particular problems, and typically involve the participation and co-ordination of the activities of several agencies. These agencies, acting on the basis of an informed analysis of particular crimes, aim to reduce the opportunities for such crime, the occurrence of the crime and the fear of crime. For example, the problem of sexual assault and rape at, or near urban schools would be an issue tackled jointly by the local police, prosecutors, magistrates, social workers, doctors and nurses, school principals, the local government departments of town planning and transport and members of local women’s, youth and church groups.

The success of these strategies depend on several factors, including:

a functioning and accessible criminal justice system;



the ready availability of and access to appropriate resources for both government and non-governmental organisations;



the ability of a wide range of government and non-governmental actors to work together;



dedicated capacity in the lead agencies — which are usually government departments — for the planning, leadership, co-ordination and management of particular initiatives; and



the capacity and ability of the affected community to innovate and contribute to appropriate interventions.

However, in the rural areas, many of these conditions are weakly developed, if they exist at all. For instance, despite the clear shortcomings of policing in the rural areas, the police are often the most developed state agency in these areas. Police officers are therefore often expected to play a variety of roles — like family counsellor, welfare agent or paramedic — which, in more developed environments, are the functions of other specialised professions.

Further, the ‘absence of power’, noted by May (and referred to above) as a defining characteristic of the poor, compounds the situation in rural areas. This is because people living in deep rural areas have limited options for making their concerns known and then for participating in and contributing to innovative initiatives. Their geographic dispersion, isolation, the very limited availability of social services and even more limited access to these services as well as the debilitating effects of poverty are important factors in this regard.

For instance, the data drawn from this research indicates a general lack of awareness of what individual or community action would be appropriate to reduce the occurrence of crime and a very limited ability to modify behaviour patterns to reduce vulnerability to crime. In addition, few people, it appears, are able to participate in community-based initiatives such as the CPFs or self-policing efforts.

Therefore, without concerted effort and a substantial infusion of resources and capacity from the more resourced and developed tiers of government to enable, drive and shape such participatory crime reduction strategies in rural areas, such strategies cannot be expected to succeed in the short to medium term. Indeed, without this dedicated support, it is unlikely that such projects would develop beyond the pilot phase.

Given this, the police are arguably the only agency in the rural areas able to provide some of the services required for enhancing safety and security in the short and medium term.

Further, the data suggests that improving policing is the intervention most sought by people living in these areas.

Thus, the role of the police in enhancing real safety and perceptions of security the rural areas should not be underestimated. As implied above, enhancing policing in these areas requires dedicated attention to those facets of policing most likely to impact positively on service delivered to the poor.

This implies upgrading the reactive functions of local police stations and structuring the proactive functions in support of this.

However, much of the investigative and intelligence capacity of the SAPS is currently invested in its specialised units. Operating within and reporting to a command structure outside of that of the stations, the skills acquired by these units remain underdeveloped at station level. Thus, to improve station level performance, the functions of some of the specialised units — like the stock theft and murder and robbery units — should perhaps be devolved to station level. The one exception would be sophisticated organised crime, which is best dealt with through a specialised national approach. It is clear, though, that some form of skills transfer, either through a dedicated programme, restructuring and redeployment, or both, is required.

Whatever the form it takes, it is clear that attention must be given to the intelligence and investigation capabilities of the local police in rural areas and that proactive strategies based on visible patrols should be driven by intelligence and geared to obtaining more.

Such interventions should focus on securing arrests and convictions, and, rather than the current focus on the rate of reported crime, measurement of these two indicators should become the key to performance assessment.