What is sector policing and what are its origins? What will its implementation mean for law enforcement in South Africa? This monograph by the Institute for Security Studies examines the experience of sector policing in London and asks what lessons can be learnt for its implementation in South Africa.
Sector policing can be defined as policing in the community, for the community. Areas are divided into smaller managerial sectors, managed by full-time police officers that patrol their respective sectors. Being stationed in the heart of a sector means that police are in greater contact with the community. However, due to the financial constraints faced by the South African Police Service (SAPS), sector policing will rely on Police Reservists (civilians) as backup. By virtue of its design for mainly urbanised areas, the sector policing policy will need to evolve in its application in rural areas in South Africa.
A case study on sector policing implementation in Holloway, north London in the early 1990s identified some key lessons for the South Africa experience. Sector policing became extinct within 10 years, after the introduction of borough policing in 1999.
- Difficulties were found in establishing sectors, defining communities and ensuring balanced representation in community consultations.
- Opposition to sector policing was found internally due to its challenging of core beliefs, values and practices in the occupational culture of police officials.
- Poor police management yielded insufficient resources and inadequate communication, therefore making sector policing unlikely to succeed.
- Targets set by the British government before and after 1997 (inception of the new Labour government) were based on improving arrest and rapid response data. Police forces directed their efforts on immediate gains such as crime fighting and incident response over softer options like community/sector policing.
The London sector policing experience raises a number of questions for South African implementation:
- Sector boundaries: how can they be drawn to ensure greater efficiency, organisationally and administratively?
- Crime sector forums: under what conditions are they able to extract the concerns of the cross-section of communities? Are they an adequate mechanism for feeding back those responses to relevant agencies?
- Capture and management of information on local crime/safety: how can the police provide this comprehensively, and in what format?
- Internal culture of SAPS: how can it be more receptive towards sector policing? How can reward structures and performance measures within SAPS be changed to reflect sector policing goals?
- Growing independence of police officials at sector level: how can supervision, discipline and accountability be maintained at this level? In particular, how can a programme with such a high degree of participation by reservists be adequately controlled?
