Bill Dixon

Getting the message? ‘New’ Labour and the criminalization of ‘hate’

Hate crimes, it has been said, are ‘message’ crimes to which society needs to respond using the most powerful and unambiguous means of communication at its disposal, the criminal law. Using empirical data collected in the course of research conducted by the authors on racially motivated violence and harassment in North Staffordshire, this article sets out to interpret the messages about hate crime sent to perpetrators, and people from their local communities, by the creation, in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, of a new category of racially aggravated offences. To this end two possible anti-hate crime messages and three potential audiences are identified and evaluated in the light of data generated from biographical interviews with perpetrators and focus group discussions with other local people in and around the city of Stokeon-Trent. Our conclusion is that the supposedly clear deterrent and denunciatory or declaratory messages contained in the 1998 Act are either drowned out or distorted by other signals coming from successive ‘New’ Labour governments about crime, immigration, nationality and ‘community cohesion’, and by the highly idiosyncratic and unpredictable ways in which they are mediated and interpreted by their intended recipients.

Community policing: ‘Cherry pie’ or melktert?

Abstract Taking Brogdens (1999:167) claim that community policing is ‘as American as cherry pie’ as its starting point, the article traces the development of community policing in South Africa since the dying days of apartheid in the mid 1980s. For analytical purposes this period is divided up into three phases: prefiguration, transition and consolidation. Although state policing provided by the South African Police (later Police Service) is the main focus of the review, it is argued that developments can usefully be seen in terms of the changing and contingent resolution of tensions between: competing civil and state-centred notions of community policing; between reactive crime-fighting or law enforcement, and proactive community-based or problem-oriented, approaches to state policing; and, finally, between more or less aggressive accounts of state-centred community policing. An extended conclusion considers the current state of community policing in South Africa and suggests that, while it is yet to become as South African as melktert, it is not quite as American as ‘cherry pie’ either.

Exclusive societies: Towards a critical criminology of post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract This paper takes a recent book by British criminologist Jock Young on crime and social exclusion in late modernity as a starting point for the development of a critical criminology of post-apartheid South Africa. The first section of the article locates Youngs work within the British tradition of critical criminology with which he has long been associated This is followed by a summary of the main arguments advanced in The Exclusive Society. In the second half of the paper these arguments are used to explore the nature and causes of crime in contemporary South Africa. It is suggested that the countrys democratic transition can be characterised, following Young, as a shift from one form of exclusive society to another. The article ends with a plea for the work of theorists like Young to be used as the basis for a critical South African criminology capable of meeting the challenges of the twenty-first century.

Making further inquiries - Policing in context in Brixton and Khayelitsha

Only rarely do inquiries into policing investigate the social context within which it takes place. This article looks at two inquiries that chose to take on this task: Lord Scarman’s into the Brixton disorders in London in April 1981; and Justice Kate O’Regan and Advocate Vusi Pikoli’s into the current state of policing in Khayelitsha in the Western Cape. It argues that they should be applauded for doing so, but draws attention to how difficult it can be to persuade governments to address the deep-rooted social and economic problems associated with crises in policing rather than focus on reforming the police institution, its policies, procedures and practices.

The aetiological crisis in South African criminology

Violent crime in South Africa has remained persistently high since the end of apartheid in 1994. Almost 16,000 murders at a rate of 31.9 per 100,000 of the population in 2010/11 attest to this. Violent crime remains a concern for government and has led one independent observer to describe South Africa as ‘a country at war with itself’ (Altbeker, 2007). This article argues that South African criminology has struggled to come to terms with the often brutal reality of the post-apartheid condition. Drawing on a notion first used by Young (1986) in relation to 1960s Britain, it suggests that stubbornly high rates of violent crime have given rise to an aetiological crisis in South African criminology. An analysis of the origins and nature of this crisis evident in recent writings on violent crime in South Africa is offered against the background of international debates about what criminology is for. A solution to the crisis is sought in work that connects history and biography (Mills, 1959) to reveal the causes, meanings and uses of violence, and point the way to a more relevant post-colonial South African criminology.