Andrew Faull

Towards a ‘New Professionalism’ for the South African Police Service

ABSTRACT South Africa faces significant challenges of violent crime. The countrys national police agency, the South African Police Service (SAPS), is often rhetorically presented as the governments response to this challenge. In recent years calls have been made for the SAPS to become more ‘professional’. These calls have come from the government, civil society and the SAPS itself. Yet beyond a common sense interpretation, it remains unclear what ‘professional’ and ‘professionalism’ mean in relation to police in South Africa. This article explores current articulations of police professionalism in South Africa against a backdrop of the historical development of policing here. It suggests that ‘professionalising’ the use of force, supporting initiatives aimed at fostering civic cultures that demand fair, polite and efficient service from police, and better defining the police role, will have a positive ‘professionalising’ effect on the SAPS. Furthermore, it suggests that there needs to be a continued shift of focus away from the police as the primary provider of safety in the country, towards a networked approach to safety generation that incorporates other government and community structures.

On the record: Interview with Francois Beukman, Executive Director of the Independent Complaints Directorate

The Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD) is South Africa’s primary independent agency responsible for investigating complaints against the police. It was established in 1997 under Chapter 10 of the South African Police Service Act. The Act makes the ICD’s sole compulsory mandate the investigation of deaths in police custody or as a result of police action. However, the ICD has also been open to receipt of complaints of police involvement in criminal activity, and failure to comply with the Domestic Violence Act. A new Bill, the Independent Police Investigations Directorate (IPID) Bill, is likely to be adopted in the third quarter of 2011. The new Act will significantly change the current functions of the ICD and will guide the transformation of the ICD into the Independent Police Investigations Directorate (IPID), providing it with its own legislation (independent of the SAPS Act). Under the new legislation the IPID will be mandated to investigate not only deaths in police custody or as a result of police action, but also complaints relating to the discharge of an official firearm by a police official; rape by a police official, rape of any person in police custody; complaints of torture or assault against a police official in the execution of his or her duties; and systemic corruption. The Bill also puts an onus on SAPS managers to report to the IPID on action taken against members following the submission of post-investigation IPID recommendations. Andrew Faull speaks to ICD Executive Director, Francois Beukman, about the changes taking place.

Policing and human rights

It could hardly have been more apt that I received my review copy of Julia Hornberger’s Policing and human rights: the meaning of violence and justice in the everyday policing of Johannesburg while attending a two-day seminar titled ‘Human Rights, Policing and Police Killings’ hosted by the South African Human Rights Commission in July 2011. Violence and state policing, while constant themes in everyday public (and private) discourse in South Africa, have become particularly topical in 2011 following a number of high-profi le incidents involving police abuse of force. Against this background many have called for pause, refl ection and intervention, while the South African Police Service (SAPS) has asked the public to understand that it is embroiled in a ‘war on crime’. Hornberger describes such rhetoric by the police to be approaching ‘a language of statekilling, which envisages a form of pure violence and pure justice that is, almost by defi nition, not mediated through the authority of the law’ (p 6). She points out that this ‘is startlingly reminiscent of the claims to the effectiveness of violence in controlling violence that were made by the apartheid state’ (ibid). With such insights, and in this context, Policing and human rights could not come at a more relevant time. The book explores the manner in which the post-Cold War drive towards human rightsbased governance intersects with the training and standards of the SAPS, and how this impacts state policing on the streets of Johannesburg. Examined with an anthropologist’s eye, Hornberger presents the paradoxes and dilemmas of policing in South Africa through ethnographic storytelling and analysis of a symbol-rich occupation.