Transitional Societies
2.6 Observations on the South African Community Visiting Schemes
The amount (or rather lack) of information obtained for the purposes of this report provides very little basis for observations and recommendations over and beyond those put forward by Ms Van der Spuy. In the absence of more recent material it is also impossible to establish whether com-munity visiting schemes were a passing fancy or a more enduring matter.
Nevertheless, a few general points will be put forward:
The history of police abuse in South Africa certainly calls for measures to watch over how the police exercise their power as well as for measures which can help promote public confidence in the police. Indeed, despite all the efforts made since 1994, the transformation of the police and the pen-itentiary institutions in South Africa, as in the Hungarian situation, is a slow, ongoing process, and allegations of police abuse are not only a thing of the past, as frequent reports in the local media and civil and criminal cases brought against police officers attest.
It is again important to note that community visiting schemes cannot and should not function in isolation and cannot and should not be seen as a ”quick fix” solution to police brutality. In any country community visiting can at best be one of a number of measures designed to ensure police accountability. A number of statutory bodies have been established in South Africa since the first democratic election in 1994 which are aimed at promoting accountability and transparency on behalf of government agencies, including the South African Police Service. With many more over-sight and complaints institutions in place, it is submitted that community visiting in South Africa, if set up properly, stands a much better chance of having a positive impact as a watchdog and confi-dence promoting institution at a national level than it did in the period from 1993 to 1995.
Without knowing the content of the national framework for community visiting which appar-ently is in the process of being approved by the Minister for Safety and Security, a few suggestions can be made with regard to the recruitment of visitors in South Africa.
It is submitted that in the South African context, with a still ongoing situation of mistrust and even violence between different sectors of society, visitors must be seen to be conspicuously inde-pendent of local political and communal factions in order to achieve credibility. This might be diffi-cult to achieve, if the institutional base for community visiting continues to be the Community Police Forums. The political fortunes of the Community Police Forums are bound to affect related initiatives such as visiting schemes. As much as community visiting needs to be apolitical and neutral, in reality ideological conflicts in the community can seep into the Community Police Forums.
INDEPENDENT VISITING MECHANISMS IN TRANSITIONAL SOCIETIES 2 Community Visiting Schemes in South Africa
While visitors certainly need to be seen to be representative of different sections of the com-munity, they should not be delegates of one grouping or another. They should be individuals appointed for the purpose because they have the personal qualities necessary to do the job.
Such personal qualities would include a sufficient amount of confidence to battle with station officers to get the facilities and arrangements that they would need to do the job properly – coming from a long tradition of repressive police attitudes, such qualities cannot be taken for granted in most people, who would have an in-built fear of the police and of repercussions resulting from criticising the police. Indeed, at least in certain areas of South Africa, there might be merit in temporarily con-sidering a Hungarian model, where a powerful, independent NGO can perform the visiting.
A model with groups other than strictly local lay people performing the task of external over-sight could also be relevant in a situation with decreasing community goodwill toward lay visiting ini-tiatives. Such goodwill may not continue to exist in a context where fear of crime and experiences of criminal victimisation are on the increase. Compared to the early days of policing reform, the political context has shifted considerably. Many people are not concerned about the welfare of police detainees in the current climate of high crime in many parts of South Africa. It is an issue which needs to be addressed in any longitudinal analysis of the rise and decline of such schemes. Without com-munity goodwill and commitment to those detained there is not much momentum for such schemes unless, perhaps, recourse is had to a professionalisation of the schemes, possibly in the form of granting access to NGO’s.
While there is obvious merit in looking at how an external oversight mechanism functions in another country and possibly getting inspiration from that when designing one’s own, the South African community visiting schemes, as they operated from 1993 to 1995, are illustrative of the problems in attempting to copy a system from a completely different context, without making sub-stantial allowances for contextual differences.
In the words of Ms Van der Spuy, the concept of community visiting schemes in South Africa
”was imported almost lock, stock and barrel from British textbooks.”106However, it would appear that while copying the actual implementation of lay visiting from the UK schemes, the strong insti-tutional back-up to the UK systems in the form of the local Police Authorities might not have been reflected in the LCC’s and later in the Community Police Forums. It is submitted that the absence of a strong (and credible) institutional base is at least part of the reason for the problems encountered in introducing community visiting to South African police stations.
It is hoped that the new national framework for community visiting which is being contem-plated at present will to a larger extent make allowances for the historical, political and legal context in which it is to operate.
INDEPENDENT VISITING MECHANISMS IN TRANSITIONAL SOCIETIES 2 Community Visiting Schemes in South Africa
106 VAN DER SPUY, E. (1995c), p.1.