Local responses to a travelling model of crime prevention and crime management : community policing in Stellenbosch, South Africa

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:The mention of any form of crime in South Africa for the most part invokes fear of both an unknown or known perpetrator who may strike at any time and inflict harm to one's body and property. Through ethnographic work that generated qualitative data, the study explores, interprets and analyses what community policing is in practice from three selected localities: Die Boord, Kayamandi and Kylemore in the Stellenbosch Municipality of the Western Cape. This is illustrated throughout the thesis by the descriptions and analysis of processes, ideas and performances of community policing from the local level. Therefore, the important issues the thesis brings out centre on how people define and perform community policing and their perceptions of it.In light of the above statements, how people understood community policing and how they created local sensibilities about community policing as a response to crime informs the discussion and analysis in the thesis. In the process, I bring out what informed people's perceptions of community policing, how people talked about crime or conceived of security. In so doing, the study aims to use local examples to reveal the at times muted and ignored responses to not only community policing, but also to broader issues around crime prevention and crime management policy and practice.Moreover, the thesis illustrates the numerous ways in which local experiences and constructions of crime shape the practice of community policing. Through the use of ethnography, the study analyses the notion of security in terms of local perspectives, local history and local security needs. The study further explores the relevance of the 'racialised' and class experiences of crime and security, as well as social divisions of age and gender in order to understand the differences in perceptions and reactions to community policing at the local level.The notions of the 'travelling model' and 'translation' provide theoretical constructs to examine how community policing is conceived of in policy at the national and provincial levels in South Africa and the links with the constant changes in the international discourse of crime prevention and crime management. The thesis concludes by illuminating the complexities involved in reforms to crime prevention and crime management in South Africa in response to changing patterns of crime and to criminals who have become ever bolder in their endeavours. In the process, the thesis offers a critique of and sheds light on, to what extent the realities of crime and its related problems in South Africa inform the re-reading of community policing and broader issues around crime prevention and crime management.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University