Police outside Ferguson Police Department, November 2014. Demotix/Bryan Sutter. All rights reserved.The massive popular
protests that followed the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner have brought
attention to questions of police reform in the United States. In debating how
the US should restructure law enforcement institutions to decrease violence and
increase accountability, we can look to the implementation of programmes in
other countries that have attempted reform. South Africa – a nation grappling
with contemporary racial divisions and a historical legacy of institutional
racism – provides such a model.
An institution of
tyranny
After transitioning to
democracy in 1994, South Africa established community-policing institutions
that helped law enforcement gain the trust of a citizenry that had viewed the
police as the militarized and illegitimate hands of the apartheid
state. In many ways, the South African case is fundamentally
different from the problem of police abuse in the US. Police brutality in
South Africa was condoned, if not endorsed, by the apartheid state. And the
scale of human rights violations committed on the part of the South African
Police Service (SAPS) was wide-ranging and profound, making a comparison to
police violence in the US difficult. Nonetheless, Americans can draw
valuable lessons from successful police reform in a nation that confronted much
tougher challenges in repairing community-police relations.
Transforming law
enforcement was at the top of the governance reform agenda of the new
democratic South Africa. By 1994, the South African Police Service held very little institutional legitimacy in the eyes of the public, as they
had been the ruthless executors of the apartheid system. Established
by the ruling National Party (NP) in 1948, apartheid was a racialized economic,
political, and legal order, intended to secure access to social benefits,
economic opportunities, political power and resources for white South Africans,
while limiting or denying access to such goods for non-white citizens. Moreover,
the system was designed to ensure that the labour of non-whites (and, in
particular, black South Africans) was made available to white
producers.
Apartheid legislation embraced
population registration, job reservation, land tenure, geographic segregation
and pass laws, as well as the disenfranchisement of non-white South
Africans. Maintaining such an order required an institution that
could secure the complete subjugation of non-whites through coercion and
force. By and large, these coercive measures were carried out by the
South African police forces.
During the 40 years of
white rule, the South African police force implemented apartheid’s laws with
brutal force. Non-white South Africans were subjected to sustained
violence at the hands of an institution whose
modus operandi was “terror, designed to promote utter and complete
submission.” The police force’s methods of control
included torture and deliberate killings, operating both within and outside the
legal rules of the system. To understand the scale of police
violence, official records are telling. In 1985 alone, 512 African
adults and 187 African juveniles were killed in police shootings. Such numbers do not account for killings not
recorded in official registers. As black resistance to the apartheid
system increased in the late 1980s, police violence only escalated.
Police brutality in
South Africa came to the world’s attention after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre
and the 1976 Soweto uprising, in which hundreds of black protesters were killed
during violent clashes with the police. But apart from these bloody
episodes, apartheid was characterized by an everyday violence and intimidation
that non-whites experienced at the hands of the SAPS. Many South
Africans recall the police force patrolling the townships of Guateng with
bright yellow Casspirs, a land-mine-protected infantry mobility vehicle
initially designed as ambush defense for the South African National Defense Force
in the Angolan Bush War conflict. The use of such military equipment
underscores the role of SAPS in maintaining a segregated police state, where casual
brutality and human rights violations were routine.
Transformation
When the architecture of
Apartheid was dismantled in 1994, the brutal legacy of police violence
remained. It was clear that the institutions of law enforcement would need
to be radically transformed in a new, non-racial and democratic South
Africa. The transformation began with a constitutional
amendment. The drafters of South Africa’s Interim Constitution
designed a new model for law enforcement that centred on the establishment of
Community Policing Forums at the provincial and local level.
CPFs are community-based
organizations that exist in the police sectors of each municipality throughout
South Africa’s nine provinces. Provincial-level institutions were
also established to oversee the municipal forums. CPFs
were designed to act as a conduit between the police and the community and have
been tasked with developing programmes that foster a working relationship
between law enforcement and communities for the purpose of enhancing public
safety. Such programmes include monthly safety meetings, victim-empowerment
sessions, neighbourhood watch sub-forums, youth anti-truancy workshops, and a
range of community-building projects.
These forums have been
successful in transforming political relationships at the local
level. During the apartheid regime the highly militarized policing institutions
had become, effectively, illegitimate. The Community Policing Forums
allowed the institutions of law enforcement to gain the trust of South African
communities by building working relationships. The forums provide a
space for law enforcement to deliver information to citizens regarding neighbourhood
crime and for citizens to address their concerns. But it also
provides a forum by which citizens can help law enforcement prevent crime or
arrest offenders by providing information unknown to the police. In
this way, CPFs help improve contact between the police and the communities they
serve by establishing the institutional base for a cooperative partnership.
These institutions were
not created in a vacuum. Other actors have been heavily involved in
the design, establishment and maintenance of CPFs, including local and
international non-governmental organizations. Within local communities,
NGOs have provided the skills, information and conflict mediation that have
been necessary for the survival of CPFs. In this way, NGOs have played a
pivotal role in implementing the framework for community policing that was put
forth in the Interim Constitution.
Despite its success in
opening lines of communication between law enforcement and the citizenry, the
community-policing model has had its share of challenges in South
Africa. Some have argued that the effectiveness of CPFs is too
dependent on the income level of the communities in which they are
implemented. In other words, community policing has been less
effectual in poor neighbourhoods, where citizens have fewer resources to
participate in such efforts. Others argue
that power struggles within communities have decreased citizen support for CPFs
in some neighbourhoods. These challenges are
significant and suggest that police reform will only be successful in the long
run if it coincides with other institutional changes that address deep
inequalities between South African communities.
Nonetheless, CPFs have
played an important role in promoting reconciliation between citizens and law
enforcement in post-apartheid South Africa. They have helped the
South African Police forces gain the trust of the communities they serve by
creating space for communication and active engagement. With a
working partnership in place, the South African model of policing has been
transformed. Pakiso
Rakgoadi notes: “The primary objective of enforcing law
and order has been replaced by the provision of safety and
security to all communities that the South African Police Services (SAPS)
serve.” On the most fundamental level, CPFs have played
a role in forging a new democratic South Africa by helping to transform the
relationship between the public and the state at the local level and
solidifying South Africa’s commitment to upholding human rights in the post-apartheid
era.
Lessons for the US
Could South Africa’s
Community Police Forums provide a model for improving community-police
relations in the US? In many ways, the US and South African cases
are hardly comparable. In apartheid South Africa, law enforcement
became the executor of a state-sponsored terror campaign. The human
rights abuses committed by the police were sanctioned by a state that sought to
maintain an institutional system of racialized segregation and
disenfranchisement. The scale of violence committed by the South
African Police Service was astounding and its execution was methodical and systematic.
Even as we recognize the
troubled persistence and pervasiveness of police violence in the United States,
human rights violations on the part of law enforcement were significantly more
extensive in apartheid-era South Africa than anything contemporary American
municipalities have experienced. In fact, police reform in South
Africa was such a salient need that it became a top agenda item in the post-apartheid
administration of Nelson Mandela and part of a larger programme of restorative
justice associated with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
That being said, the
current state of community-police relations in some cities in the United States
is not entirely unlike the condition of community-police relations across South
Africa in 1994. In many US cities, especially those with high percentages of
minorities, citizens fundamentally distrust law enforcement. For
instance, a recent Gallup
poll found that nearly 60 percent of white Americans have confidence that
their local police will protect and serve them, while only 37 percent of black
Americans do. The source of this mistrust is
manifold. It originates in the historical dynamics of race-relations
in America. It originates in encounters with excessive use of force on the part
of the police. And it originates in a lack of accountability of
police officers that have been accused of such abuses.
Mistrust is compounded
by perceptions of inefficacy, as communities feel politically powerless to
change this state of affairs. And it is aggravated by the use of
military-grade equipment to quell the pockets of resistance that have emerged
in recent months. In many of these cities, citizens have begun to
question the very legitimacy of law enforcement. These same problems
existed in South Africa in 1994 and their origins, though contextually
different, were similar. They were addressed – and, in many ways,
ameliorated – with concerted efforts at police reform and the kind of
institutional changes that Community Police Forums exemplify. As
such, South Africa provides a model for an institutional solution to problems
in the US that have existed for decades, but have lately resurfaced with a
sense of urgency.
Many have suggested that
solutions to problems in Ferguson, Missouri lie in changing the racial
composition of both the police department and city council leadership, which
are heavily dominated by whites in a city that is over 60 percent African-American. Following the 1992 riots over the acquittal of
police officers accused in the Rodney King beating, the city of Los Angeles
undertook such reforms. In its racial composition the LA police department now
reflects the community it protects, in that 45 percent of personnel are
Hispanic and 13 percent are African-American.
Changing the demographic
composition of police departments to reflect the people they serve is a
necessary reform in racially divided municipalities. It will undoubtedly
increase confidence in law enforcement among minorities and, in general, help
to broaden social equality in our communities. But such a reform may
not be sufficient to mend deep-seated distrust of police in some neighbourhoods. Bridging
these divides may require a new paradigm of community policing in ethnically
divided communities, one in which law enforcement maintains a working
relationship with the citizenry.
Community policing could start with the establishment of CPFs that would
serve as an institutional conduit between neighbourhoods and local police
stations. These forums have the potential to open much-needed lines
of communication, increase the professionalism of the police force, and create
a mechanism of accountability for law enforcement conduct. In
addition, CPFs would help to empower communities that have been affected by
police violence by providing an institutional voice to the
citizenry. Finally, CPFs have the potential to increase the
effectiveness of local law enforcement, as communities can provide information
necessary to combat crimes if they are given opportunities to participate in
public safety initiatives.
Implementing this kind of reform will prove more difficult in the US
than it was in South Africa. While South Africa is a unitary state
with a national police force, the US is a federal system comprising multiple
levels of police jurisdiction. This fragmented system inhibits the
creation of a coordinated national system of Community Police Forums with
regional and municipal level branches. Police reform in the United
States, then, will most likely be a decentralized and piecemeal
effort. However, municipalities would be wise to consider
implementing community policing forums, especially in diverse, urban areas with
high incidents of police violence. They can look to reform in
multi-ethnic South Africa as a model of community policing that helped rebuild
broken trust between the police and the citizens they serve.