scholarly journals GETTING INTO THE CITY BEAT: Challenges facing our metro police

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gareth Newham
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Crime Prevention ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Traffic Control ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Police Departments ◽  
The Past ◽  
Police Agencies ◽  
The City

It has been a little over five years since metropolitan police departments were first established in South Africa. Despite relatively small numbers of operational personnel, they now form a familiar part of the policing landscape. With good reason, metro police officers do better at traffic control than crime prevention, and their relationship with the SAPS needs attention. This article reflects on their achievements over the past years and some of the key challenges confronting these local level police agencies.

scholarly journals The Economics of Policing and Public Safety

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-28
Author(s):  
Emily Owens ◽  
Bocar Ba
Keyword(s):  
Police Officers ◽  
Local Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Relative Magnitude ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
Police Departments ◽  
Indirect Benefits ◽  
Monitoring Strategies ◽  
Police Action ◽  
The City

The efficiency of any police action depends on the relative magnitude of its crime-reducing benefits and legitimacy costs. Policing strategies that are socially efficient at the city level may be harmful at the local level, because the distribution of direct costs and benefits of police actions that reduce victimization is not the same as the distribution of indirect benefits of feeling safe. In the United States, the local misallocation of police resources is disproportionately borne by Black and Hispanic individuals. Despite the complexity of this particular problem, the incentives facing both police departments and police officers tend to be structured as if the goals of policing were simple—to reduce crime by as much as possible. Formal data collection on the crime reducing-benefits of policing, and not the legitimacy costs, produce s further incentives to provide more engagement than may be efficient in any specific encounter, at both the officer and departmental level. There is currently little evidence as to what screening, training, or monitoring strategies are most effective at encouraging individual officers to balance the crime reducing benefits and legitimacy costs of their actions.

scholarly journals BRING THEM INTO LINE: Managing corruption in SAPS and metro police departments

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Faull
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Police Departments ◽  
Police Corruption ◽  
Police Services ◽  
The Past ◽  
Police Agencies ◽  
Working Together ◽  
Municipal Police ◽  
Perceptions Of Police ◽  
National Police

Police corruption has become increasingly topical following the corruption charges levelled against the SAPS National Commissioner early this year. South Africa has a national police service as well as one municipal and five metropolitan police services. Public debate around the ‘police’ generally fails to distinguish between these independent organisations, and perceptions of police corruption negatively undermine the entire policing fraternity. Because of this, the various police agencies should consider working together on corruption. This article examines approaches to corruption in the national, metropolitan and municipal police services. Among others, important issues that need to be addressed are the disciplinary code within the metro police departments, the lack of investigative powers granted MPD officers, and the SAPS’s failure over the past seven years to effectively implement any relevant strategies.

Battered bodies: Characterizing Johannesburg’s apartheid past and present in Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 213-228
Author(s):  
Addamms Mututa
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
The Past ◽  
Black Characters ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Narrative Spaces ◽  
The City

Narratives of traumatic citizenship not only raise questions about the past, but also they give voice to contemporary stories about this past. In post-apartheid South Africa, these questions, markers of apartheid temporality, are embodied in, among other sites, the representation of battered Black bodies in cinema. This article critiques the characterization of Blacks as narrative spaces to illustrate the temporality of distress and trauma from apartheid to post-apartheid Johannesburg in Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi. It argues that the film posits Black characters as latent archives of intergenerational historical narratives that probe the apartheid past and speculate on the post-apartheid future in the city of Johannesburg. Consequently, the juxtaposition of embodied narrative archives and apartheid temporality, the article posits, is a crucial model in the theorization of battered Black bodies’ contiguous nostalgia.

scholarly journals Industrial strategy and local economic development: The case of the foundry industry in Ekurhuleni Metro

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 448-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
T Phele ◽  
S Roberts ◽  
I Steuart
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Local Economic Development ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Action Plans ◽  
Foundry Industry ◽  
The Past ◽  
Concrete Action

This  article explores the challenges for the development of manufacturing through a case study of the foundry industry in Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality. Ekurhuleni Metro covers the largest concentration in South Africa, but the industry’s performance has been poor over the past decade.  The findings reported here highlight the need to understand firm decisions around investment, technology and skills, and the role of local economic linkages in this regard.  The differing performance of foundries strongly supports the need to develop concrete action plans and effective institutions at local level to support the development of local agglomerations.

scholarly journals Out from the Curtains of Secrecy: Private University Police and State Open Records Laws

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Josh Moore
Keyword(s):  
Police Officers ◽  
Private Universities ◽  
Private University ◽  
College Campuses ◽  
Deadly Force ◽  
Police Departments ◽  
The Past ◽  
Functional Equivalency

The role of police officers on college campuses has grown in the past 40 years from that of “glorified custodians” to full-fledged police officers, often with powers to search, detain, arrest, and even to use deadly force. Yet most state open records laws have not kept up, failing to require disclosure of records about crimes reported to or arrests made by sworn police officers at private universities. This article provides a full national picture by identifying the statutes and analyzing the cases to address whether state open records laws apply to private university police. It then suggests that the “functional equivalency test” provides courts a method to require transparency at these police departments.

scholarly journals Transitioning from pandemic to normalcy: what police departments can learn from the rank-and-file

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Janne E. Gaub ◽  
Marthinus C. Koen ◽  
Shelby Davis
Keyword(s):  
Police Officers ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Police Departments ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Coding Schemes ◽  
Police Agencies ◽  
Police Executives ◽  
Police Personnel

PurposeAfter more than 18 months of life during a pandemic, much of the world is beginning to transition back to some semblance of normalcy. As that happens, institutions – including policing – need to acknowledge changes that had been made during the pandemic and decide what modifications and innovations, if any, to continue moving forward.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use semi-structured interviews and focus groups of police personnel in the United States (US) and Canada. The sample includes police officers and frontline supervisors (n = 20). The authors conduct qualitative analysis using deductive and inductive coding schemes.FindingsThe sample identified four areas of adaptation during the pandemic: 1) safety measures, 2) personnel reallocation, 3) impacts on training and 4) innovation and role adjustments. These areas of adaptation prompted several recommendations for transitioning police agencies out of the pandemic.Originality/valueA growing number of studies are addressing police responses to the pandemic. Virtually all are quantitative in nature, including all studies investigating the perceptions of police personnel. The body of perceptual studies is extraordinarily small and primarily focuses on police executives, ignoring the views of the rank-and-file who are doing the work of street-level police business. This is the first study to delve into the perceptions of this group, and does so using a qualitative approach that permits a richer understanding of the nuances of perception.

Local Government Reforms in Federal Brazil, India and South Africa: A Comparative Overview

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 453-470
Author(s):  
Helder Do Vale
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
Institutional Processes ◽  
The Past ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Government Reforms

This article examines the changes at the local level of government that have been taking place in Brazil, India and South Africa for the past thirty years as a result of complex federal decision-making processes. I summarize the most important federal traits of these countries and identify the role of key institutions behind the fiscal, political and administrative changes in local governments. The article draws on the institutional processes to dissect the anatomy of local government reforms in these countries and concludes that although the changes in local government structures and powers have been taken against the background of transition to democracy and/or democratic deepening, the scope of change in local government varied.

Model (my) neighbourhood – a bottom-up collective approach for crime-prevention in Portugal and Lithuania

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 166-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Saraiva ◽  
Irina Matijosaitiene ◽  
Mónica Diniz ◽  
Vilius Velicka
Keyword(s):  
Crime Prevention ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Social Constraints ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Content Type

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to respond to the need for comparative studies on methodologies for implementing Crime Prevention through Urban Design and Planning (CP-UDP) at the local level, particularly in peripheral Europe where CP-UDP’s top-down standards have poor dissemination and acceptance. This paper debates how local partnerships can help reduce crime and how a CP-UDP-based model can be introduced into municipal planning. Design/methodology/approach The paper discusses the challenge of CP-UDP in the framework of a post-crisis Europe and Europe 2020. Because there is a large gap between theory and practice, lack of a shared holistic approach, and scepticism, or lack of knowledge, of public authorities, at local-level planning professionals and the police have devised bottom-up initiatives based on interdisciplinary partnerships with the community. The paper describes, discusses and compares the implementation of such approaches in Lisbon (Portugal) and Vilnius (Lithuania). Findings The paper addresses the processes and challenges of establishing synergies and working relationships between police officers, public officials and the community, and it discusses six main causes for its (un)success. When these conditions were met, crime and social constraints reduced. Practical implications Lessons learned are deemed crucial to disseminate knowledge and best practices, paving the way for proper top-down policies and planning legislations in these and other countries. Originality/value This paper analyses the potentialities and shortcomings of local-level implementation of CP-UDP strategies as an alternative to failed top-down strategies in two realities mostly unknown of the international scientific community. The case study material is previously unpublished internationally.

scholarly journals Can development axes be identified by socio-economic variables? The case of Czechia

Geografie ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 114 (4) ◽  
pp. 245-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiří Blažek ◽  
Pavlína Netrdová
Keyword(s):  
Socioeconomic Development ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Regional Analysis ◽  
Regional Level ◽  
The Past ◽  
Socio Economic Variables ◽  
Regional Analyses ◽  
The City ◽  
Growth Centres ◽  
Autocorrelation Method

This article aims to contribute to existing analyses of regional development in the post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) by conducting a detailed regional analysis at the municipal (LAU II) level in Czechia. The focus on such a detailed regional level allows for the testing of several hypotheses, for which traditional regional analyses based on NUTS II – NUTS III data were insufficient. First, we investigate whether development axes, as used in planning documents, manifest themselves at a higher level of socioeconomic development. Second, we expect the formation of clusters, exhibiting a higher level of socioeconomic development, around strong growth centres, such as the city of Mladá Boleslav. Third, we explore whether increasing differentiation has shifted from the regional level to the microregional/local level during the past 15 years of the post-socialist transformation. To address these hypotheses, we analyze a set of socioeconomic variables with the help of the spatial autocorrelation method, which allows us to generalize the inevitably, highly fragmented patterns found at the local level.

scholarly journals Negotiations of Socio-Spatial Coexistence through Everyday Encounters in Central Athens, Greece

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 150-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva (Evangelia) Papatzani ◽  
Lena Knappers
Keyword(s):  
Local Level ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Social Needs ◽  
Social Boundaries ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Migrant Populations ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The Past ◽  
Settlement Dynamics ◽  
The City

Over the past decades, Athens has emerged as both a destination and gateway city for diverse migrant populations. Athenian urban development interrelated with migrants’ settlement dynamics has resulted in a super-diverse and mixed urban environment. This article focuses on the western part of Omonia, in central Athens, Greece, and investigates sociospatial trajectories of migrants’ habitation, entrepreneurship, and appropriation of (semi-)public spaces. It draws on scholarship about everyday encounters where negotiations of difference and interethnic coexistence take place at the very local level. It explores encounters between migrants, as well as between migrants and locals, that are created due to their everyday survival and social needs. The article argues that these ‘place-specific’ and ‘needs-specific’ encounters emerge as ‘micropublics’ that are open to negotiation, manage to disrupt pre-existing social boundaries, and epitomise processes of belonging in the city. The article draws from ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative semi-structured interviews carried out from 2013 to 2014 and from 2018 to 2019.

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