INSIGHT | Police minister sidelines CPFs at our peril

Police minister Bheki Cele is getting a taste of what it’s like to police SA with a lot more clout and reduced civilian oversight. He clearly savours this experience, especially the plummeting crime levels.

More draconian provisions in the regulations were narrowly averted but most of Cele’s cabinet colleagues have already leapt to the defence of the handful of SA Police Service and South African National Defence Force personnel who have resorted to bully-boy tactics.

A notable casualty in the new policing strategy is the partnerships and citizen oversight arrangements we’ve come to know as community policing.  

Community Policing Forums (CPFs) are locked down with the rest of us and are missing from recent announcements by the department.

To understand the significance of this shift, it is useful to recall why we had CPFs in the first place.

As a Black Sash staff member in the mid-1990s in  the Eastern Cape, I was involved in attempts to reconfigure relations with our traditional political foes, the apartheid police.

Until then, the battle lines had been simply drawn. The police harassed or arrested us and we responded with petitions, legal action and protest.

As the demise of formal apartheid loomed, heightened political resistance made the repressive role of the police more difficult.

The police operated under a state of virtual siege, able to venture into the townships only in armoured convoys bristling with weapons, teargas and rubber bullets.

Increasingly, commanders on the ground, barracked behind barbed wire and sandbags, were forced to either use "dirty tricks" or seek some form of consensus for any action, even if it involved non-political policing.

As municipal buildings smouldered and boycotts closed shops, the local cops scratched around for a compromise that fell somewhere between locking the armoury and going home on the one hand, and provoking another bloody confrontation with protesters on the other.

Suddenly, station commanders of small, conservative white towns like Alexandria in the Eastern Cape became amenable to unthinkable political and operational compromises such as a march down the main street led by Cosas, with ANC and UDF banners aflutter.

Then came the regime’s formal policy for hervorming or toenadering (reform or rapprochement).

For the first time, the apartheid police and local authorities were initiating meetings with popular structures and trying to negotiate peaceful outcomes.

Even the riot squad commanders seemed to want to avoid another brawl.

With the National Peace Accord, signed in 1991,  came structures like dispute resolution committees and eventually  CPFs.

These were no longer ad hoc street inventions to avoid bloodshed but formal legal structures in which the police had to toe the line.

From the outset, ANC activists were suspicious of CPFs, sometimes with good reason — the regime had a long history of conjuring up co-optive bodies whose main function was to slow real transformation while "defusing" political tensions.

The CPFs were different, however — many grew organically out of community initiatives to avoid pointless and damaging conflict with the police.

The National Peace Accord spoke to a wider vision of society, human rights and the role of the police.

Police found themselves saddled with the unfamiliar task of advancing fundamental rights and behaving in a manner that would build trust with the public.  

Community policing was even included in the interim (1993) constitution with the purpose of “promotion of the accountability of the service to local communities and co-operation of communities with the service”.

For the police, this promised a new and welcome scenario where communities were acquiescent in respecting the law and helped to prevent and report crime.

For communities, the pay-off was that for the first time, police would provide a "service" in protecting them from crime and violence.

Further, police would listen to people’s needs and give feedback.

These principles were carried forward into the SA Police Service Act of 1995 and subsequent community policing frameworks and guides.

In practical terms, the CPF model emerged as a cornerstone of policing in SA, particularly as a joint state/society response to escalating crime.

CPFs succeeded because they were run by cops who had a culture of following orders and seeing through policy directives.

Battling with a poorly managed transition, including weak crime intelligence and investigative skills, the police needed all the help they could get.

CPFs have enjoyed a resilience and civic functionality not evident in most other systems for citizens’ participation, including ward committees.

Despite this success, CPFs barely feature in more recent policy instruments such as the 2016 White Paper on Safety and Security.

The ANC has long been ambivalent about CPFs, perhaps because they were one of the few public forums to resist party interference.

Also, CPFs sometimes attract suspicion because they stand apart from local leadership cabals that (mis)direct allocation of municipal resources.

Recent policy on community safety is shaped by socio-ecological considerations and prioritises co-ordinating structures like Community Safety Forums.

However, the new policy makes only a grudging attempt to integrate CPFs.

Despite this ambivalence of the ANC government towards CPFs, it is unfathomable that these structures have been sidelined by lockdown regulations.

If the minister is lulled by the short-term dip in crime statistics, he is more short-sighted than we feared.

In the next few months, as the pandemic takes hold and unemployment rockets, crime is going to be driven by hunger and desperation.

Even in the least dystopian scenario, the police will be sorely in need of CPFs to maintain any form of public co-operation and social consensus in poor neighbourhoods.

Glenn Hollands works in the field of municipal governance and community safety