CHAPTER 3
WEST RAND SECTOR POLICING:
VISION, IMPLEMENTATION, PHILOSOPHY
Sector Policing on the West Rand
Three Case Studies
JONNY STEINBERG
Three ingredients of success
The West Rand ’s project to introduce sector policing in its 11 constituent station precincts is at once very ambitious and painstakingly cautious. It is ambitious because the form of policing the West Rand Area management envisages extends well beyond the modest changes to current practice a narrow reading of the Draft National Instruction would suggest. In both, the detective32 and the uniformed branch stations are almost entirely stripped of centralised capacity. For instance, the station-level crime prevention unit – historically the core of visible policing capacity, which allows station managers to police hotspots in numbers – is disbanded. Instead, day-to-day visible policing capacity is permanently distributed into the sectors. In an ideal, fully resourced station, each sector is staffed by a sector manager and at least eight uniformed patrol officers. The latter are permanent and active sector officers: they are expected to attend every Sector Crime Forum (SCF) in their sector, to have a working knowledge of the crime patterns and risk factors in their sector, to participate in sector-specific problem-solving exercises at monthly meetings, to gather sector-based intelligence, and to establish crime prevention initiatives with citizen networks. Note that this is not a sector manager’s job description: it is the job description of every uniformed officer, from inspectors to constables. Each sector is policed by at least one dedicated, 24-hour sector vehicle, staffed by these sector-dedicated personnel.
During the first months of sector policing on the West Rand, station-level management fought hard against the disbanding of their crime prevention units. They worried that stripping their stations’ centralised capacity would render zones of their precincts unpoliceable. Area management was faced with a choice: it could either revise its plans and hold back a portion of personnel and capacity for the centre, or it could go the whole hog. It went for the latter. The motivation, according to a senior manager at Area Office was this:
Once you allow stations to keep their crime prevention units, you leave the back door open: you give stations the space to move backwards. There is a danger that managers will keep shifting the goalposts, keep leaning more on their crime prevention unit, and less on their sectors. True, crime prevention units make it easier to police hotspots, but they are no good at problem-solving. A large crime prevention unit follows orders. It is does not take the initiative. So we had to close the back door and make sure that the organisation had no choice but to move forward.33
It is in this regard that the Area’s sector policing project is so ambitious. Sector policing has to work because every other capacity is stripped. Either the decentralised organisation polices by solving sector-based problems, or policing simply does not work at all. There is no alternative. Much rides, then, on the Area’s capacity to institute significant changes in policing culture and practice throughout the organisation quickly and on the hoof.34
Yet if the vision is ambitious, the implementation is cautious. The first sectors on the West Rand were launched in April 2003. At the time of writing, October 2004, the transition to sector policing is not quite complete. It has been a slow and incremental process. The first rule of implementation is that sector policing is impossible in the absence of a substantial increase in personnel and resources. The second is that since resource increases are to occur incrementally, so should the launch of sectors; no sector is to be launched without the guarantee that it has the infrastructure and staff to be sustainable over the long term.
Incoming resources were not distributed equally; they went to priority stations first. And within station boundaries, resources were prioritised to high-crime sectors. Thus, for instance, in April 2003, Randfontein divided its precinct into seven sectors but launched only two. The remaining five were launched at intervals over the following 18 months. Kagiso was divided into five sectors, but only three were launched immediately. Early in the process, Area management recognised that it was launching sectors too quickly, that some were unsustainable. It began to slow the process down. It will probably take until early 2005 for every demarcated sector on the West Rand to be operative.
In talking about the introduction of sector policing on the West Rand, then, one is talking not only of a new policing practice, but of an Area dramatically better resourced than it was 18 months ago. Roodepoort, for instance, had a staff complement of 180 members in the year before its first sectors were launched. At the time of writing, shortly after the launch of its ninth sector, its police personnel number was 340. In Kagiso, the number rose from 134 to over 200 over a 19-month period. It should also be noted that most incoming personnel were recruited directly from police college into sector work.
It was pointed out in Chapter One that a common problem encountered by COP and POP is the occupational culture shock experienced by police officers. Accustomed to a form of work characterised by rapid responses to immediate problems, officers are confronted by a paradigm that assigns to them the work of long-term problem-solvers. As is evident in the case studies below, grassroots resistance to sector policing from within police ranks is, in fact – 18 months after its launch – minimal. Ordinary members on the West Rand, perhaps more than managers, have taken extremely well to the introduction of sector policing. The most rudimentary tasks – if not some of the more complex tasks – of the new paradigm, are performed with accomplishment and enthusiasm.
If this is indeed the case, there are at least three factors that have made the smooth transition possible. The first is an Area management corps which has grasped the concept of sector policing with enthusiasm, rather than having it thrust upon them. The importance of this point cannot be emphasised too much. In most provinces and areas, sector policing is to emerge from a National Instruction. There is no guarantee that it will be received by a willing corps of police leaders. Ambivalent managers will, in senior superintendent Peche’s phrase, “leave the back door open”. Second, the transition has undoubted ly benefited from the fact that a large proportion of sector personnel are recently recruited police officers. Sector policing is their first and only experience of policing. There are no old ways to be unlearned. Finally, veteran middle-ranking police officers’ first experience of sector policing has come in the form of a dramatic increase in resources and infrastructure, and a vastly improved managerial support system. In other words, sector policing has been coupled with unprecedented improvements in the conditions of their working lives and in their capacity to perform their work. The combination of these three ingredients appears to have been pivotal. Take one of them away, and the introduction of sector policing may well have been beset by a host of very serious problems.
How sectors are policed and sector police officers evaluated
Once a month, every station member is required to attend a meeting at which each sector delivers a monthly or quarterly presentation of its crime trends and its activities to a senior Area manager. Tracking the structure and substance of this presentation offers a convenient summary of how Area expects each sector to be policed.
Targeted patrolling and the policing of risk factors
The sector manager presents his or her monthly crimes stats and notes which crimes have increased and which have decreased. She then presents a map on which the sector’s crimes are plotted. Crime increases are thus marked not only by type, but by geography, time of day, and day of the week. Hotspots are marked in red. Each is discussed individually – how it was policed last month, how it will be policed next month.
The first stage in this exercise is rudimentary and routine – it is about how to design targeted patrols and police risk factors. If the sector’s primary problem is gun-related predatory crimes, the sector is expected to conduct serial stop-and-search procedures in the vicinity of the hotspot at the times of day and days of the week at which the crimes are concentrated. If the sector’s problem is residential burglary, the area is mapped for hotspots, access routes and open fields. Vehicles and pedestrians are to be serially stopped and searched at appropriate times and places.
More nuanced patrolling strategies are also developed. The crimes associated with each shebeen in the sector are monitored. Shebeens that do not generate crime are left alone. Those that do are subject to a host of different policing strategies, depending on the nature of the problem. Area management acknowledges that raiding and closing a shebeen is a temporary measure that comes at the price of deteriorating community-police relations. Attempts are made to police risk factors more subtly. In regard to shebeens associated with common robbery and assault, the vicinity around the shebeen is patrolled intensively on weekend nights and drunk people arrested and put in the police cells for the night. The patrons of shebeens associated with gun-related crimes are harassed and badgered, their evening entertainment rendered unpleasant. Patrons in cars are stopped for breathalyzer tests. Shebeens are searched for weapons and drunken patrons arrested. Repeating this procedure every weekend night is designed to encourage armed patrons to drink elsewhere or leave their firearms at home.
However, as we shall see in the following chapter, the nuances of Area’s understanding of policing shebeens are often lost in translation: what happens on the ground is sometimes far blunter and less thoughtful.
The evaluation of members’ enthusiasm in performing targeted patrols is rudimentary but stern. The name of each member is paraded before the meeting, together with a list of the arrests he made and the goods he confiscated the previous month, on a Powerpoint presentation. If a sector’s violent crime has increased, the rate of arrests for drunkenness is low, and the number of firearms it has confiscated is paltry, it is performing its most basic functions poorly and is told so. Alternatively, if a member has only arrested illegal immigrants, and cannot explain why targeting them is reducing identified crime patterns, he is told he has been wasting his time.
Each member is also evaluated for the number of informers he handles and the amount of money he has spent on information claims. The idea, of course, is that it takes information and intelligence to transform the blurred lines of a hotspot into the identification of specific perpetrators.
If it is clear that a particular crime problem is beyond the capacity of the sector team to police adequately, Area offers appropriate support. This may take the form of a team of plainclothes officers to police a pedestrian pathway prone to common robbery, extra numbers to saturate a gun-ridden zone of the sector, or the Area Commissioner conducting negotiations with the metro government to tackle problems of environmental design.
From targeted patrols to problem-identification
Once hotspots have been mapped, the sector manager presents a photograph of each hotspot. The idea is to understand each hotspot as a physical and social terrain, and thus to attach its crime patterns to specific problems. Members are encouraged to find environmental and situational causes of crimes in hotspots and to offer target-hardening solutions. They are also obliged to record how many civilians and civilian networks they have contacted in hotspots, how they have approached them, and what sort of crime prevention partnerships they have established with them.
Members must present a list of physical and social factors throughout their sector that might contribute to crime. These can range from broken street lights, to unnumbered houses, the emergence of a group of homeless children, the presence of street gambling, unlit open spaces, the presence of vacant houses, the opening of a taxi rank, intermittent power failures, to the emergence of a kangaroo court in an informal settlement. Each factor is discussed individually and solutions are proposed. Members are also obliged to search for these factors by communicating with civilians. Members must list how many civilians they contacted during the previous month. They are also obliged to distribute their dedicated sector cell phone number, and to encourage residents to use it to lodge complaints and to give and receive information. Finally, the sectors are obliged to report on the composition of their SCFs, the problems raised there, and the solutions it has proposed.
The discussion above is telescoped. It is neither exhaustive, nor does it reflect all the nuances involved in the design of patrols and the identification of problems. Nor, for that matter, does it reflect the extent to which ideas generated at Area and station level are lost in translation as they get closer to the ground. Such matters are amplified in the three case studies below.
It should be noted that the case studies were conducted 18 months after the launch of sector policing on the West Rand. I thus did not witness teething problems, initial resistance or the inevitable fumbling of new projects and ideas. The three stations chosen are all regarded as relatively successful by Area management. The idea is to record best practice, and as diverse an array of social and physical contexts as possible were chosen.
