Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation

The 1996 National Crime Prevention Strategy

by
Janine Rauch

To be published by the Institute for Security Studies.

Janine Rauch is an independent consultant.

Origin and development of the NCPS

The initiative to develop a National Crime Prevention Strategy began in early February 1995 as a response to President Mandela's address at opening of Parliament, which raised concerns about crime.

The situation cannot be tolerated in which our country continues to be engulfed by the crime wave which includes murder, crimes against women and children, drug trafficking, armed robbery, fraud and theft. We must take the war to the criminals and no longer allow the situation in which we are mere sitting ducks of those in our society who, for whatever reason, are bent to engage in criminal and anti-social activities. Instructions have therefore already gone out to the Minister of Safety and Security, the National Commissioner of the Police Service and the security organs as a whole to take all necessary measures to bring down the levels of crime. (President N R Mandela, 17 Feb 1995, Cape Town)

Part of the response to the President's speech was the development of the SAPS' 1995 'Community Safety Plan', a package of short-term policing measures aimed at tackling the priority crimes in the country. In May 1995, an inter-departmental strategy team, composed largely of civilian officials, began the process of drafting a long-term crime prevention strategy, which would become known as the National Crime Prevention Strategy (NCPS). The intention was that the long-term strategy would tackle the root causes of crime, in parallel to the Police's Community Safety Plan, which would deliver more effective responses to crimes which had already been committed or planned. This bifurcation is essential to an understanding of the shift in government crime prevention policy in the five years since the NCPS was adopted. At that time, the tough, crime combating approach was contained in the Community Safety Plan (and later the various 'Police Plans'), and the planning and implementation processes for those were entirely separate to those for the NCPS.

The Ministers responsible for initiating the NCPS did not give detailed guidance to the drafters, instead encouraged an extremely broad approach:

Cabinet has asked us to design the process which will eventually culminate in a comprehensive and holistic National Crime Prevention Strategy. The NCPS which eventually emerges should be owned by the broadest possible cross-section of South Africa's population, and should go beyond a mere police response to crime. … In considering the process which should be followed, this Committee should bear in mind the complexity of the causes of crime and therefore pay proper attention to political, social and economic causes and manifestations of crime. … If this Committee succeeds with its task, the NCPS could result in answers to the question: What is crime prevention all about? It could result in a recognized and co-ordinated government response to crime, and in a greater role for civil society and communities in the prevention of crime. (Mufamadi May 1995)

At the same time that the NCPS was being developed, the National Growth and Development Strategy (GDS) of Government was launched. In an effort to integrate the crime prevention approach with the overall socio-economic development approach, the NCPS became one of the 'pillars' of the National Growth and Development Strategy.

We can already define the six pillars of our Growth and Development Strategy. They are not new. In fact they have emerged by clustering the key areas identified in departmental and provincial policies and plans. Their power is their simplicity. Although not every issue of importance to every department is covered explicitly, these pillars aim to encompass and crystallise all our work. They are as follows:

Although the National Growth and Development Strategy was abandoned by government not long after the NCPS was adopted, the inclusion of crime prevention in an economic development strategy was symbolically important. For the first time, crime prevention was recognized as one of the key national priorities. The contextualisation of crime prevention within the six pillars of the NGDS made links between crime and the economic development of the country and its people, which had not been seen before in government policy.

By early 1996, the drafting of the NCPS was in its final phases, and Business Against Crime (BAC) had been established and began to assist the process. An early draft of the NCPS was presented to key ANC Ministers and officials from their departments before its first presentation to the Cabinet Committee on Security and Intelligence. At that meeting, the ANC Ministers expressed their unease with a strategy that was purely long-term in nature. They instructed the drafters to add an additional component to the strategy document, reflecting the current actions and short-term plans of the range of government departments involved in crime reduction. Already the Ministers were aware that there constituency was hungry, not for 'more plans' – the popular interpretation of the plethora of government policymaking that characterized the early post-democracy period – but for a tough approach to criminals. In response to the Ministers' concerns, a chapter was added to the draft Strategy, describing the measures already being implemented by the different Departments in respect of the seven identified priority crimes. This section reflected the need to demonstrate short-term crime combating strategies as well as longer-term prevention approaches. It demonstrated that many Government Departments were already taking steps to deal with the priority crimes, but also clearly exposed the lack of co-ordination among government agencies.

The NCPS was approved by Cabinet in May 1996, and launched in the final days of the Government of National Unity. It was welcomed by all the parties in government, the ANC, the IFP and the NNP. However, in a massive public-relations gaffe, the NCPS was launched shortly after SAPS National Commissioner George Fivaz announced the launch of the "1996 Police Plan". The resultant confusion between the SAPS' strategy and the government's long-term crime prevention agenda reinforced the gulf between immediate short-term responses to rising crime, and the need for a developmental crime prevention agenda which could ensure an eventual decline in the crime figures.

Despite the problems associated with its public launch, the NCPS began to introduce a new paradigm for dealing with crime in South Africa. Some of the key concepts that it introduced were:

Four types of prevention (pillars) were described in the original NCPS and seven national priority crimes identified. What was never well conceptualized or communicated was the intersection between the types of prevention, and the priority crimes. This led to a belief that the main implementation approach should be a focus on the 'pillars' – an approach which saw structures and processes in isolation from the content of the crimes they deal with.

Implementing the NCPS

The NCPS document proposed a number of 'national programmes', but provided scant detail on how these programmes should be developed and implemented. After the adoption of the NCPS, Business Against Crime took the initiative to assist government with an investigation of problems and possible solutions in the criminal justice process, as a means of kickstarting the activities envisaged in 'Pillar 1' of the NCPS, the programme dealing with criminal justice reform. BAC arranged for Andersen Consulting to perform a 'pre-scoping exercise' in the criminal justice system, to identify key blockages and possible points of intervention. Thus the first significant activity in the life of the NCPS was focused on the criminal justice system ('Pillar 1') rather than on the situational or social approaches to prevention envisaged in some of the other pillars. The BAC consultants recommended a priority list of areas for intervention. The priorities were:

The NCPS document did not promise that Government would make available more resources for crime prevention, but encouraged Departments to rationalise existing resources and allocate them to activities aimed at reducing the identified priority crimes and at the NCPS national programmes. This re-prioritisation process was one of the most painful aspects of the transformation process in government overall, and was not likely to deliver significant funds to enable the implementation of new policies such as the NCPS. Fortuitously, in September of 1996, the Reconstruction and Development Fund made available a cross-departmental fund of R174 Million, to fund implementation of the NCPS. The unusual and sudden appearance of a large pot of funds quickly exposed inter-departmental rivalries and differences of emphasis in departments' understanding of crime prevention. (These differences would re-emerge in the later debates between social crime prevention and law enforcement approaches). The decisions on allocation of the RDP Funds were based on the findings of the Andersen investigation. They planted the seeds of what is now known as the integrated justice system initiative (the IJS), encouraging inter-departmental collaboration and an approach which emphasized information technology as a key tactic to achieve streamlining in the criminal justice system. Today the IJS initiative is the flagship of the government's crime prevention programme.

In October 1996, Bernie Fanaroff (formerly the head of the Reconstruction and Development Programme in the President's Office) was appointed in the Department of Safety and Security as co-ordinator of the NCPS. His appointment gave the NCPS some political stature within the senior echelons of government, and he was able to interact with a wide range of government departments, many of whom had previously never considered themselves players in crime reduction. Fanaroff and Azhar Cachalia (the Secretary for Safety and Security) established a range of structures for decision-making and support for the NCPS, and maintained a strong relationship with Business Against Crime.

In mid-1996, the process of provincial mobilization behind the NCPS was initiated, as envisaged in the final chapter of the original document. The national department of Safety and Security began holding 'provincial crime prevention summits'. The aims of the summits were:

This approach to the summits was more focused on implementation of the NCPS than on a participative, rolling-out process of policy consultation and refinement, as envisaged in the original strategy document. Already this demonstrated a shift from participative policy-making towards implementation (or 'delivery', as it later came to be known). Little was done in these early months to reach local authorities and mobilize them in the prevention effort, and this became a focus of the subsequent White Paper on Safety and Security in 1998.

The NCPS co-ordinating office set u a number of committees and was increasingly given responsibility for new government initiatives related to crime. Most of the projects envisaged in the Andersen scooping report were implemented. Some of the programmes identified in the original NCPS – like gun control, vehicle crime, corruption, juvenile justice and victim empowerment – had been conceptualized or implemented. New projects had been added, mainly by the Ministers (who were facing increased public pressure and a series of crises in the criminal justice system). These included security systems at prisons to reduce escapes, investigations into bail administration, management of the awaiting trial prisoner population, border control and illegal immigration, drug abuse, gangs, domestic violence, and school safety.

By the end of 1997, it was clear that the NCPS was trying to manage too many issues, and it was suggested that projects should be evaluated for their contribution to the larger goal of crime reduction. There were two key reasons for the concentration of government's crime prevention efforts around the NCPS office. Firstly, the NCPS office was staffed largely by people who were (politically) trusted by the ANC Ministers – it was made up mainly of civilians, rather than police officers, and most of them had joined the public service after the ANC's first election victory. Secondly, the Ministers had their hands full, trying to direct the process of transformation in each government department. In the security sector, this entailed not only rebuilding public confidence in the institutions of government, but also – simultaneously – managing complex organizational change processes in large bureaucracies, and supporting the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process. The Ministers were largely concerned with restructuring, re-planning and re-directing their departments, and had little or no capacity to develop innovative responses to the burgeoning crime problem. They were also skeptical of some of the crime-fighting tactics proposed by senior officials in the criminal justice system, most of whom had served the apartheid regime. It was therefore unsurprising that they tended to assign an increasing number of increasingly complex crime and criminal justice issues to a small group of trusted civil servants in the NCPS office and their respective Ministries.

Financing the NCPS

Criminal justice consumes a large, and - until recently - rapidly growing, share of South Africa's national budget. In the late 1980's, the about 5.5% of the budget of the South African government was devoted to the main criminal justice departments. Rapid growth in the police budget in particular (especially in 1990/1) meant that by 1994/5, 9.1% of the budget was devoted to the these departments, and the proportion spent on criminal justice currently stands at over 10%.

The original RDP funds allocated to the NCPS largely served to build, renovate or replace infrastructure in key areas of the criminal justice system. This meant that the bulk of the money actually spent did not represent the implementation of crime prevention policy, as much as it represented a process for replacing infrastructure – a process that could, alternatively, have been the responsibility of the departments concerned. Examples of this include:

Apart from the concern about whether these projects could/should have been the responsibility of the relevant departments, the fact that the NCPS funded these infrastructural projects may have created the impression in state departments that the NCPS was a source of funds with which departments can supplement their budgets, rather than a source of funds for genuinely new prevention activities.

Government budgeting happens in a medium-term expenditure framework, which runs on a three-year cycle. This meant that the implementers of the NCPS faced a situation, for two years, in which their budgets had made no provision for new NCPS activities. This led to frustration (both on the part of officials and concerned civil society groups) with the lack of implementation of NCPS activities. However, in recent years, many NCPS programmes have been accommodated in the budgets of the criminal justice departments, and the Treasury has taken a more active role in managing the negotiations between these departments to decide on which projects are funded and which departments receive funds for implementation of NCPS priority programmes.

Managing the NCPS: the structures

The NCPS document proposed a range of structures to enable improved inter-departmental co-operation around crime prevention. It proposed a National Committee of Director-Generals, of Ministers, and of senior departmental officials. It proposed similar structures at provincial and local government levels. The NCPS was based on the assumption that integrated programmes requiring the participation of more than one Department, and integrated inter-departmental planning structures, would enhance the co-ordination which was previously lacking between the different Departments dealing with crime in South Africa. This approach assumed that co-operation between the departments would arise naturally and spontaneously when they were required to work together on the identified cross-sectoral programmes set out in the document. It was soon obvious that co-operation did not arise naturally or spontaneously, because almost all of the financial and performance incentives in government act against co-operation and integration of effort and very few, if any, reward co-operation directly. To develop and maintain co-operation therefore required a great deal of effort, leadership, the maintenance of project management disciplines and a management information system.

The NCPS provided a framework for problem solving, in which national government departments, different tiers of government, and organisations from civil society would be brought together in order to identify and implement multi-agency solutions. The success of the NCPS is therefore completely dependent on the quality of co-operation, agreed and improved focus on joint priorities, and the sharing of information. The institutionalisation of co-operation is essential for it to be effective and sustained. Implementers of the NCPS are still struggling to find incentives that encourage system-wide co- operation and integration without compromising the requirements of public financial accountability and performance management. However, since 1998, levels of commitment and co-ordination have improved, for a variety of reasons:

It is important to note, however, that in almost all of the multi-agency projects of the NCPS, there was a stage in which the project has had to be driven from the centre (such as the NCPS office or one of the Ministries), until the project had gained some momentum. This experience provided a strong argument for the retention of some central capacity to oversee and co-ordinate all NCPS activity. This argument was made in the 1998 White Paper on Safety and Security, which proposed a 'National Crime Prevention Centre' to be housed in the Secretariat for Safety and Security.

The beginning of the re-think?

In 1997, an internal review of NCPS activities recommended that

Many of these issues should have been addressed in the original NCPS. They did inform subsequent developments in government crime reduction approaches, and continue to shape the policy agenda today. Two critical conceptual links were made in this period: the need to link enforcement and prevention, and the need to link immediate (short term) actions against crime with the longer-term processes envisaged in the original NCPS. These two themes were, to some extent, a reflection of tensions within the public service more widely – tensions between the old guard, whose strength lay in tough tactics and immediate action, and the new appointees, who tended to emphasise planning.

The 1998 White Paper on Safety and Security

The 1998 White Paper on Safety and Security deepened government's policy approach to crime prevention in South Africa, and suggested areas for revision of the original NCPS, based, in part, on the experiences captured in the 1997 NCPS Review.

In addition to making changes in respect of the institutional arrangements within the Department of Safety and Security, and shifting the emphasis of policing to crime investigation, visible policing and improved service to victims; the White Paper made a number of policy proposals in respect of crime prevention.

The key conceptual guidance provided in the White Paper was that policing (law enforcement) and crime prevention should be integrated and "inter-locking". This aimed to address the rift between the endeavours of the NCPS and those of the SAPS in the Department of Safety and Security. The White Paper provided a new definition of crime prevention, which included "all activities which reduce, deter or prevent the occurrence of specific crimes firstly, by altering the environment in which they occur, secondly by changing the conditions which are thought to cause them, and thirdly by providing a strong deterrent in the form of an effective criminal justice system". This was an attempt to encapsulate both criminal justice and social crime prevention within government's crime reduction agenda.

In the area of social crime prevention, the White Paper introduced new approaches such as "developmental" crime prevention aimed at young people and families; "situational crime prevention", and "community crime prevention", which are targeted at specific local areas, at the same time as reinforcing the already-entrenched emphasis on criminal justice reform.

The White Paper went further than the original NCPS to define the roles of national, provincial and local government in respect of crime prevention; and placed significant emphasis on a new role for local authorities in crime reduction. The White Paper proposed that local authorities could contribute in two key ways: by ensuring effective enforcement of traffic laws and local bylaws, and by playing a role in the local co-ordination and initiation of social crime prevention programmes. Although shifting the crime prevention function to local level was a logical and internationally-proven approach, it failed to take effect in South Africa, primarily because the new policy was not accompanied by new funds or capacity-building for local authorities. Other chapters in this book refer in more detail to the problems faced by local authorities in attempting to implement the vision contained in the White Paper.

The 1998 NCPS Review

Shortly before the end of the first Cabinet's term of office, a Review of the NCPS was commissioned. The Review drew on a range of official reports that had made comments on the NCPS since its launch in 1996, including the 1997 Auditor-General's Report on the NCPS and the 1998 Presidential Review Commission. The findings of the Review were hard-hitting:

The recommendations of the NCPS review were made to the new Ministers responsible for the NCPS, after the June 1999 election, and correlated easily with the new approach of the Mbeki Cabinet.

After the second election: a new political era for crime fighting in SA

The new Ministers in the Justice, Safety and Security and Prisons portfolios commenced their terms of office with remarks and policy statements intended to clearly differentiate them from their predecessors. This was made clear by Minister Maduna (Minister of Justice) soon after his appointment:

As our country embarks on the second democratic term, we have to reflect on the shortcomings of the previous term and resolve to improve significantly on performance. While over the last five years the Department was able to lay a solid legislative and indeed infra-structural foundation for a strong and responsive justice system, many problems continue to plague our justice system and at times evoking public sentiments that the new democratic order is more sympathetic to human rights concerns of criminals and less sensitive to the plight of victims of crime and the general sense of insecurity that continues to besiege our country. (Maduna, June 1999)

His colleague, Minister of Safety and Security, adopted a tough tone from the outset:

The criminals have obviously declared war against the South African public. … We are ready, more than ever before, not just to send a message to the criminals out there about our intentions, but more importantly to make them feel that 'die tyd vir speletjies is nou verby'. We are now poised to rise with power and vigour proportional to the enormity and vastness of the aim to be achieved. (Tshwete June 1999)

The new Ministers infused the NCPS with the rhetoric of 'war on crime', distancing themselves from its origins as the 'soft', developmental side of government's strategy to deal with crime. Although perhaps a perversion of its original intents, this approach permitted the survival of the NCPS, understood now mainly as a mechanism for government co-ordination.

The new government followed the recommendations of the 1998 NCPS Review in prioritizing the following issues:

The selection of these priorities showed that some lessons had been learnt from the early years of the NCPS: violent crime needed to be prioritized, as did organized crime. The new approach to the NCPS was strengthened by the emergence of the National Director of Public Prosecutions (and the Scorpions) as major roleplayers in the new 'war on crime'. With strong direction from the President, inter-departmental co-ordination improved significantly in the post 1999 period. These developments were driven by a political leadership which was far more sensitive to the concerns of the citizenry – no longer focused largely on the transformation of the bureaucracy, and more concerned with delivery of services, government began responding to crime with the sense of urgency and toughness that their constituents demanded. By March of 2000, opinion polls found that public confidence in government's ability to control crime had increased markedly (Business Day 9/3/2000).

Perhaps the most critical shift in the government's crime prevention approach in this period was the merging of what had previously been described as 'short-term', operational, or immediate actions, with the longer term strategies for criminal justice reform and social prevention. For the new Ministers, there was no separation between police and army roadblocks in Hillbrow, and the information technology complexities of the IJS: they considered both to be part of the NCPS. This was evident in the Minister of Safety and Security's first speech after his appointment to the position.

The criminals have obviously declared war against the South African public. In response our Government formulated the National Crime Prevention Strategy which would serve as a basis for the eradication of the criminal activity which has pervaded practically all spheres of life in our country. It is not that Government did not have a plan aimed at ridding our society of this particular scourge. What is required now is a ruthless implementation of that plan. (Tshwete June 1999)

Future plans for dealing with crime: the 2001 Budget Review

The 2001 Budget Review is a sound indicator of future government policy, because it defines government's expenditure priorities for the 2001/02 to 2003/04 period. The new priorities all contribute to the crime prevention effort:

That safety and justice are regarded as priorities on a par with job creation and development indicates that delivery in relation to crime and violence, safety and justice is seen as key to the success of government as a whole. For that reason, the 2001 Budget reflected significant additional resources having been allocated to the criminal justice departments. These allocations, coming on the back of the rapid rise in spending on criminal justice over the past decade, need to be considered in relation to the high levels of crime and low levels of prosecutorial success, as well as the pressures confronting the prisons.

The additional resources allocated to the criminal justice cluster, together with the manner in which the baseline budgets have been allocated to the various functions and activities which make up the work of the system, reflect the following priorities:

Government intends the budgets of the criminal justice departments to grow at rates well in excess of anticipated inflation in this financial year and for the next two years. Overall, the budget will grow by 2.9 per cent more than the rate of inflation between 2000/01 and 2003/04. The Department of Justice and Constitutional Development will see the fastest budget growth of 7.6 per cent a year over the period, with much of that growth concentrated in 2001/02. (This is true even if the once-off allocations for TRC-related reparations are stripped out for the 2001/02 and 2002/03 financial years). Correctional Services (3.2 per cent a year), SAPS (1.8 per cent a year) and the ICD (0.1 per cent a year) follow the pace set by the Justice budget.

The growing allocations to the individual departments are intended to fund the following spending programmes over the next three years:

SAPS
Justice
Corrections

In the Budget Review, the government has defined a policy agenda that strongly supports a criminal justice and law enforcement approach, with little attention to the social crime prevention approach proposed in the 1998 White Paper. Although this shift is hardly new, it demonstrated their response to the policy-makers' dilemma that Simpson describes:

For policy innovation to be effective in a society in transition there has to be at some level an active process of acquiring public support. There is no question that the [long-term crime] prevention agenda is the best vehicle for dealing with violence and crime, but, because we did not have short-term enforcement measures that built popular confidence upfront, the wider prevention agenda was discredited. The people on the ground were not feeling the effect of any short-term safety and security measures. The lesson learnt is not so much about how we strategically defend creative policy intervention, but about how we build the mechanisms which anticipate shifting popular concerns, and build public confidence, at the outset. (Simpson 2000)

The future of social crime prevention hangs in the balance. Some social programmes are under way, led from within the SAPS National Division on Crime Prevention. They include projects dealing with rape, local government capacity-building in crime prevention, and schools safety. If those projects are sustained and evaluated, and benefits can be shown, perhaps they will lead to renewed interest in the long-term, developmental approach to crime prevention.

Those committed to the promotion of social crime prevention in South Africa would do well to bear in mind that the promotion of a preventive agenda is a battle that still needs to be regularly fought, even in countries with a far longer history of 'war on crime' than ours.

For the past twenty years, criminal justice practices have been so profoundly ill-conceived that they have been bound to fail. As the failures have accumulated, the justice system has responded by adding more of the same policies. Prison and jail populations in this nation have tripled since 1980, and law enforcement expenditures have quadrupled, but polls show that most Americans do not feel safe. Legislatures lengthen sentences and add more mandatory minimum penalties. More police are hired, more prisons built. Still, we do not feel safe. In response, policy-makers continue to expand the same criminal justice apparatus: more enforcement, longer sentences, more prisons. If this 'get tough' strategy worked, the results would be apparent by now. They are not. (Donziger et al:1996:198)

Perhaps the Ministers responsible for crime prevention in South Africa are already learning this lesson. In his Budget Vote in Parliament this year, the Minister for Safety and Security conceded that current SAPS crime fighting methods "have not yielded the desired result". "Let us find an alternative", Tshwete told parliament, "we all underestimated how difficult it would be to transform the SAPS and the whole criminal justice system." (Business Day 8 June 2001)

Note:

The shift in the focus of the provincial processes, from consultation to implementation, was criticized by Scharf and Artz (1996)

References

Business Day 09 March 2000 'Tshwete factor' boosts confidence, Taryn Lamberti

Business Day 08 June 2001 Crime war not being won, says Tshwete, Vuyo Mvoko

Donziger SR et al (1996) The Real War on Crime: The Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission. Harper Perennial, New York.

Maduna P (1999) Statement by the Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development, Parliamentary Media Briefing, Cape Town, 28 June 1999

Mandela, NR (1995) Address of President Nelson Mandela on the occasion of the opening of the second session of the democratic parliament: Cape Town, February 17, 1995

Mbeki, TM (1995) Address by Deputy President TM Mbeki, at the development planning summit, hosted by the Intergovernmental Forum, 27 November 1995

Mufamadi FS (1995) Introductory remarks by the Minister for Safety and Security at the first meeting of an inter-departmental committee on the National Crime Prevention Strategy, 16 May 1995

Scharf W and Artz L (1996) Government Responses to Current Crime Wave: Crime Prevention Policies and Programmes of Central Government. Commissioned Report for the Nedcor project on Crime, Violence and Investment

Singh, A (1997) National Crime Prevention Strategy: Changing the Face of Crime in South Africa. Occasional Paper 4-97, Institute of Criminology, University of Cape Town

Simpson, G, Hamber, B & Stott, N (2001) Future Challenges to Policy-Making in Countries in Transition, Presentation to the Workshop Comparative Experiences of Policy Making and Implementation in Countries in Transition, 6th - 7th February, Derry/Londonderry Northern Ireland.

Tshwete S (1999) Statement by the Minister for Safety and Security, Parliamentary media briefing, 28 June 1999

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