SaferSpaces

South Africa has not had a formal national policy to improve public safety since 2004. This changed in 2016 when cabinet adopted the White Paper on Safety and Security. This is the government’s flagship policy on crime, safety and violence prevention. However, implementation is the key challenge. The White Paper…

Police work exposes one to the underbelly of society. Most South African Police Service (SAPS) officers will experience and possibly perpetrate violence long before they enter the service. Many probably continue to experience and use violence outside of work while employed as SAPS officers. Based on available data, SAPS officers…

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa used his State of the Nation Address on February 7 to outline his relatively new government’s actions and plans. However, the crime prevention strategies he outlined were somewhat stale. Most, especially those related to policing and gender-based violence, have been tried before. They yielded few…

Social cohesion has frequently been used in government policy documents in South Africa since the late-1990s. Be that as it may, there have been very few detailed analyses of the direct and indirect linkages between social cohesion and violence. That said, in the South African literature on collective violence, particularly…