The opening address was made by Annalizé van Wyk (MP) of the Portfolio Committee of Safety and Security (PCSS). She set the tone for the conference by outlining the security triangle consisting of the SAPS, private security and community and stating that "security has become everyone's business," and then posing the question: How will we translate this shared responsibility into positive effects on the crime situation? She spoke of the old regime of Apartheid, and said that with regard to the SAPS, the "iron fist of the past" had no place in the new South Africa. Using Mamelodi SAPS (in Pretoria) as an example, she illustrated how a healthy relationship between the community and the police can create a safer environment. The members of Mamelodi's community, she said, know that their voices are heard and that their contributions will be reacted upon. The SAPS in Mamelodi, in turn, know that the community's information is reliable, which helps to argue the case against bail being granted to violent criminals that much better. The relationship between the community and the SAPS, she said, was heavily dependent on trust coming from both sides.

The Portfolio Committee, she said, was an oversight body which visits police stations. She made the suggestion that the PCSS needs to have more contact with the community because "we cannot perform oversight while receiving information from the very body we oversee". An annual survey was proposed, through which the PCSS could investigate the community's experience of crime and policing.                                                                                                                              

She also emphasised the importance of taking the time to give credit where credit is due. "To criticise is easy," she said, "but no_one should rejoice in crime".

Prof Clifford Shearing, director of the Centre of Criminology at UCT and the NRF chair, gave the next presentation. Prof Shearing is an internationally acclaimed criminologist who has decades of policing experience and expertise which is in demand across the globe. He prefers to use the term "policing", because he believes that societal regulation goes far beyond the police. This holistic approach was sparked, in part, by an early experience in Apartheid South Africa when Prof Shearing was fired from a farming job by a farmer who accused him of "inciting the natives to rebellion" when he invited some black farm workers back to his house for a braai. "That farmer was as much an agent of the state as any police officer," he told Edge Magazine in 2001.

There are more entities involved in the multilayered world of security than ever before. The world of policing is changing, he said, which is a worldwide phenomenon, and wherever changes happen there are great opportunities that could and need to be taken.                                                            

Prof Shearing spoke of an experience which affected his view of policing, which was a trip to Disneyworld. There were no police about, he said, yet it was a perfectly secure environment because every person on the grounds had a security function. The queues, for example, were arranged in such a way that people were constantly facing each other. The provision of basic facilities such as entertainment, food and sanitation are also an important deterrent to crime, he said, because people who are tired, hungry, bored or uncomfortable become troublesome and pose a security risk.

Prof Shearing said that there is no reason why South Africans shouldn't live in a safe society, because we have all the resources, knowledge and abilities to create it. The problem, he explained, was that resources were not being used and efforts not being made in a coordinated way. This is not surprising, he said, considering that South African security initiatives were developed in a "higgledy_piggledy" way over the years, and that the negative effect of this is that there are now various institutions (private or governmental, voluntary or commercial, formal or informal) whose mandates and activities overlap, causing them to object to one another and creating gaps. Our private security industry, for example, is one of the largest in the world, but due to a fragmented set of nodes their effects on crime are limited. The positive side to this is that interesting new innovations were made by communities who have attempted to self_govern.

Prof Shearing used the metaphor of a boxer who is punching below his weight because although all of his limbs are strong and effective, they are not working together. How, he asked, can we punch above our weight? He suggested that what is needed is to institute methods to coordinate policing on a massive scale. Once we can manage to do this, he said, we have "kicked our problem".

The ministry for Safety and Security, he suggested, should not be seen as a police institution but as an institution for creating strategies, ways of bringing resources together. The police budget, for example, could be renamed as the "policing" budget, and therefore be considered as a broader tool for fighting crime which extends beyond the SAPS. He also said that the SAPS is being expected to do far more than is reasonable, and they would be able to do so much more once they stop trying to do everything. Their role in society, he said, needs to be readdressed.

The next speaker was Prof Etannibi Alemika, of the Department of Sociology of the University of Jos, Nigeria. Prof Alemika holds a PhD in Criminology and Sociology of Law, and is also an internationally recognised expert on the subject of policing. His presentation centred mainly on African urban areas. The African city, he said, is outgrowing the entire Africa. In the next 20 years, less than 40% of Africa's population will be living in rural areas. Cities have the image of being the greener pasture, but many people moving to cities may find themselves out of work, isolated and frustrated, making them turn to criminal activity as a coping mechanism.

The crisis occurs when there are divisions in the urban population due to the glaring inequalities between different classes living in close proximity in the cities. Political discourse tends to centre on who is advantaged and who is disadvantaged, exacerbating the problem. Governmental responses to the problem include repression, the destruction of slums, the simultaneous mobilisation and suppression of community initiatives, political calculation and bias in urban development. This creates distrust in the government and the police, as well as xenophobia and "gated communities".

Some areas, he said, have been "leased out to organised criminals" and that the people living in those areas are beginning to be considered by the government as "disposable". The impression is that the crime situation in these areas is being ignored in the hopes that the problem will sort itself out, that the criminals will in time execute each other, and that this is acceptable in as long as it doesn't spill over its borders.

Prof Alemika suggested that research_based coordination, with the complexity of various interest groups as its main reference point, is what is needed.

Julie Berg of the Centre of Criminology at UCT, presented her report (entitled Plural Policing In Cape Town: Recent Trends and Challenges to Oversight), which was based on research done over the period of 2006 and 2007 at the Centre. The report dealt mainly with policing in three different CIDs (City Improvement Districts) in Cape Town. It outlined the roles played by different security bodies and by the bodies which oversee them, including the ICD (Independent Complaints Directorate) and PSIRA (Private Security Regulatory Authority). It was found that the working relationship between the SAPS, the Metropolitan Police and private security tasked with working in the CIDs was working well. She said that the way the Metro Police enforce by_laws and create better visibility was having a positive effect, and that private security was also giving great support to the SAPS as a "force multiplier". She also presented her findings with regard to oversight bodies, including the fact that most oversight bodies said that they needed more resources, more power and more exposure in order to operate more effectively.

She also presented a list of challenges facing partnership policing, saying that the power issues between the role_players and lack of driving personalities were a threat to sustainability.

Christine Hentschel of the Department of African Studies (University of Leipzig, Germany) gave a presentation on research she has been doing in Durban. The way urban spaces are designed, the way they look and are imagined, both by communities residing in them and by police, can have a significant impact on successful urban policing, she said. The citizens must feel "wanted", and people must be encouraged to take ownership of the space they live in, so that they will become active in protecting that space. Irvin Kinnes of the Institute of Security Studies mentioned Project Manenberg as an example of an initiative which was aimed at creating dignity and pride in the community in order to mobilise them towards protecting their space and not tolerating criminal elements.

Barbara Holtmann of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research gave the next presentation, which was very well received by all the attendees. She spoke of the challenge of breaking the cycle of crime and violence on a local level. There seems to be a problematisation of young men, she said, and that deterrents "mean nothing because they weren't expecting to have a good day tomorrow".

She approached crime as a social problem, factoring in absent fathers, teenage pregnancy, alcohol abuse and lack of quality of life. "The context for crime centres around a low level of trust in the criminal justice system," she said, and this contributes to the emergence of vigilante activity. She suggested that crime statistics should not be considered as a measure of the effectiveness of the police but as a measure of society, and that whenever crime statistics are released, other statistics should be released at the same time: health, education, etc so that people will make the link between these things.

She said that it was important to have an image of a safe society in mind while working towards it. In an experiment, a group of schoolchildren were asked to draw pictures of a safe school and the pictures they drew all involved things like barbed_wire and police with guns. This is tragic, she said, because it means that our children cannot imagine a society free from criminal elements.

The next speaker, Amichand Soman (Director: Legal Services, National Secretariat of Safety and Security) spoke of partnership policing. He gave a brief explanation of the mandates of the different role_players, including the SAPS, private security and CPFs, and explained the legislation that governs them. He examined the concept of partnership policing, questioning whether private security encroaches on the functions of the police. He also explained the different ways in which private security aids the police (by making citizen's arrests, arriving at crime scenes before the police do in order to keep them safe from tampering, and increasing visibility) and also the disadvantages of the private security industry (the profit_motive, their dependence on the prevalence of crime, and the question of affordability). "There are a number of legal impediments to the concept of partnership policing," he warned.

A recurring theme between speakers was the reiteration of Prof Shearing's idea that providing basic services to people was essential to curbing crime. Crime tends to thrive in places where there is lack of education, poor health services, poor social development and inadequate employment and housing, and this implicates governmental departments responsible for providing these services. The notion of Zero Tolerance, said Prof Shearing, could be applied in a new way. Instead of just thinking "we won't tolerate criminals," the view should extend beyond criminals which are violent and visible to include things that create security risks, to say "we won't tolerate poverty," "we won't tolerate lack of education," etc.

The answer is not more police and bigger prisons, and the role of the Ministry for Safety and Security needs to be redefined. Safety must be viewed in a context that includes other role_players, and indeed everyone, in the fight against crime. The triangle image of the police, justice department and correctional services as being the only role_players in policing is a relic of the past.