Community policing and disputed norms for local social control in post-apartheid Johannesburg

Abstract

Ryan Carrier (1999), reflecting on policing in South Africa, has pointed out that there may be different types of order that are not necessarily mutually exclusive: he argues that the type of order that the state seeks to guarantee may be different from the type of order that businesses, affluent suburbs, townships and corporations wish to establish or preserve. He concludes by saying that different types of order may call for different types of policing. Whilst this idea seems interesting regarding the way communities can gain control over their direct environment, it is also quite challenging when thinking of equality in the access to security - especially in South Africa, where the idea of 'separate but equal' development has sinister overtones. In the current worldwide context of security governance and of development of community policing principles, the line between what communities are entitled to do and what they should leave to the police is very blurred, particularly so when norms regarding social order vary in space and time. Security norms to be implemented at the neighbourhood level have to be negotiated between communities and public authorities, and within communities themselves. This article, based on field study in suburbs and townships in post-apartheid Johannesburg, argues that there are different 'cultures' of policing and different conceptions of local social order embedded in different local histories and contrasting socio-economic settings. The South African state is currently attempting to homogenise security practices and to 'educate' people in a democratic policing culture. At the same time it is also firmly setting some limits (for instance by rejecting road closures and vigilantism) to the local security experiments developed in the period following the demise of apartheid. However, its current policy, supposedly designed to 'unify' the policing systems under common principles, is based on the broad encouragement of community participation in the production of security, as well as on the promotion of zero-tolerance principles. These policies actually serve to exacerbate local differentiation regarding the content and practice of policing as well as the undemocratic principles rhetorically resisted by the state.