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13 February 2007

Madam Speaker,
Honourable Members,

The African National Congress (ANC) has started organising its structures, Comrade President, to give expression to the marching orders you gave at Witbank, Mpumalanga, on 13 January, as our own input to the fight against crime in South Africa.

You reminded us on that occasion that "the police service and government agencies cannot fight crime alone, and that it requires the involvement and active participation of all communities and all sections of society to meet this challenge."

Your observation, Comrade President, was a reminder of what we have always known in the ANC. That question and other matters that were canvassed within our ranks did not automatically become law in the new South Africa. Some of them changed in both form and content on the operating table of negotiations. Discussing the matter of policing in 1992, as part of our overall strategy to prepare ourselves to govern the country, we said among other things:

"Community policing has now been recognised as more effective because it understands that it is not the police alone who combat and prevent crime. It is the community who are largely responsible for criminal prosecutions. They lay charges, make statements, testify in court, and assist the police in the performance of their functions. Without this co-operation no police force can discharge its duties."

Our view, at the time, was that effective policing was not dependent on huge police numbers but rather on better police-community relations. The key, we argued, was the ability of the police to root themselves among the people and work together with the communities in a well-defined partnership to prevent and combat crime.

Defining that arrangement we said:

"The relationship between the police and the policed should be one of reciprocal control."

We insisted on the accountability of the police to local communities who would have to assess police performance against "verifiable standards." We were clear that "unless the police are rooted in and accountable to the communities in whose name they police, they will not enjoy the support of those communities." We may have raised those questions as ANC members but we understood, Comrade President, that we were addressing national security. We were clear that national security was a national mailer. It required the involvement of all South Africans from all walks of life in our country. And when we spoke about our communities we meant all of them. That continues to be our position.

Crime, Madam Speaker, is a very emotional matter. Crime is emotional because it affects many people directly. But, while we must all agree that crime is a serious matter in South Africa, it is incumbent on all of us as leaders, Honourable Members, to be logical and rational in our response to the scourge. There are many South Africans who understand that truth, Comrade President. They are members of South Africa's various Community Based and Non-Governmental Organisations, the labour movement, business and religious sectors, as well as some political parties.

One of the responses must be the mobilisation of our communities to work together with the police to prevent and combat crime. The people at local level are the best repository for information. They know who is where and doing what even when it relates to crime and criminality.

At this juncture, Madam Speaker, allow me to mention, the role that politicians like the Honourable Patricia de Lille have played in mobilising residents in the areas where they live to participate in crime prevention. The Honourable de Lille, together with a number of residents she has helped to mobilise against crime, takes turns to patrol their area alongside the police.

There are other experiences, like Mannenberg, where Comrade Mario Wanza lives. He too has played a leading role in mobilising people in his area to participate in crime prevention and fighting.

Dr Mzukisi Qobo is of one mind with you, Comrade President, when you say, as you did on Friday, that "working together to achieve the happiness that comes with freedom applies equally to the challenge of dealing with crime. Certainly, we cannot erase that which is ugly and repulsive and claim the happiness that comes with freedom if communities live in fear, closeted behind walls and barbed wire, ever anxious in their houses, on the streets and on our roads, unable freely to enjoy our public spaces. Obviously, we must continue and further intensify the struggle against crime."

In a column piece he did for the Cape Argus on Friday, Dr Qobo wrote:

"The emergence of a more stable, healthy and balanced society will not come as a result of technical and administrative work of the government but through collective ownership of the existing challenges and preparedness to step out of our comfort zone and be responsible citizens, including through wealth and skills transfers from areas of high resource concentration to areas of low resource concentration.

Crime is a collective responsibility and dealing with it would require fundamental change in the social structure in South Africa, as well as a serious examination of the state of morality of our society."

Dr Qobo is a Mellon Research Fellow in the Department of Politics, at the University of Stellenbosch.

No crime in South Africa terrifies our people like serious and violent crime. That type of crime is visited directly on victims in the form of serious and violent assault, rape and murder, as well as attempts to cause such violence.

Research by some independent bodies and the South African Police Service (SAPS) indicates that most of those crimes happen between people who know one another, and occur, mainly, in secluded areas including behind the doors of the homes of either perpetrator or victim.

The police analysed recently 9 623 dockets for murder, attempted murder, rape, serious and violent assault and common assault. The result of that analysis was published in the 2005/06 SAPS annual report.

What the exercise revealed was that 81,5% of the murder victims were killed by persons they knew. The killers in 61,9% of the cases were relatives, friends or acquaintances of the victims. In 75,9% of rape cases the victims knew the rapists, while in 56,9% the rapists were relatives, friends or acquaintances of the victims. Cases of assault showed higher percentages of perpetrators known to the victims, including relatives, friends or acquaintances.

It seems to me that we need to do more than just policing to deal with such crimes. I believe that those crimes are a direct consequence of moral decay within our communities. Others are generated by the social conditions under which people live.

There surely must come a time, Mr President when, as South Africans, we will come together and do a thorough assessment of the extent of the damage that apartheid caused to our people as a whole — oppressed or not oppressed. Apartheid contributed directly to the destruction of family values that were built over many centuries by the indigenous people of our country. Apartheid contributed directly to the collapse of the moral fibre in many of our communities.

An exhaustive interrogation of that question, therefore, may provide the answer to the problem of social crime in South Africa.

Meanwhile, the ANC Commission on Religious Affairs intends to place the matter of social crime, especially the serious and violent kind, on the agenda of the programme of religious interaction on the moral regeneration campaign. It is a fact, Madam Speaker, that everywhere the partnership between the residents and the police has taken root, crime has gone down. This is true of Alexandra, Sebokeng, Orlando, Motherwell and other places that I will mention during my Budget Vote speech later this year.

The South African Reserve Bank (SARB) and the South African Banking Risk Information Centre (SABRIC) have partnered the police to deal with armed robberies in a project that is called Cash Risk Management, or CRIM, in. short. The relationship has extended to other enterprises, including the retail sector, and the gambling, entertainment and property industries.

The campaign by the police in the second half of last year which drastically brought down armed robberies, especially at banks and other financial institutions as well as cash in transit heists benefited tremendously from the co-operation with business and many members of our communities, who supplied the police with valuable information.

The President, through the Presidential Big Business Working Group, influenced the forging of a relationship between that group and the Justice, Crime Prevention and Security cluster of Cabinet. That partnership is working well in the search for the necessary responses to crime in South Africa. A system of regular interface between the two sides has become an established norm.

But, allow me, Madam Speaker, to go back to the original point I made about community-police relationships. One of the most important interventions South Africa made to realise that objective was the establishment of the Community Police Forums (CPFs). We must admit, though, that the final product of our labour was not the formidable structure we thought would help communities "to assume a more active role in crime prevention and in the policing of their areas."

The CPFs should have been defined as intermediaries between the people and the police and should have been given the task to root the police among the people as a necessary element of the partnership between them. The law establishing the CPFs could not be faulted except where it assigned the responsibility to create the structures to the police themselves and charged them with the responsibility of resourcing the structures. The upshot has been uneven development of the CPFs.

The ANC believes that we should go back to the original concept and make the CPFs autonomous bodies that would be responsible to the communities they serve but work closely with the police in a manner where they would discuss with them the policing priorities of the given local areas and help assess police performance on the basis of such priorities.

Given that the CPFs would be responsible to the people who would use democratic means to establish them, they would have a dynamic relationship with both the communities and the local government authorities.

It is quite clear, though, that the interventions we need to make relate to the entire Criminal Justice System. Safety and Security, Justice and Correctional. Services are already working in an integrated fashion, together with the country's intelligence community to deal with crime as a united entity. Without reinventing the wheel, we would like to expand the work of the CPFs for interventions across the Integrated Justice System.

These matters, Comrade President and Madam Speaker, will be subjected to further scrutiny at the ANC Policy Conference in June. It is our hope that when they are endorsed they will come to Parliament where amendments could be made to existing legislation to create the conditions that our situation demands - of better community-police relations for our nation, united in action to "erase that which is ugly and repulsive and claim the happiness that comes with freedom."

Issued by: Ministry for Safety and Security
13 February 2007