Blog – Urban safety

Local government, the closest interface between government and communities, is a key driver of quality service delivery including the promotion of community safety. The Constitution demands that services and functions that have the most developmental impact on citizens should be performed by local government.

In response to the Covid-19 crisis, South Africa has had one of the strictest lockdowns worldwide, restricting movements significantly and citizens were only allowed to leave home for essential services like shopping and doctors’ visits. Public Spaces are abandoned areas during this time. However, social inequality and the imbalance of opportunities remain apparent - maybe more than ever before.

The State of Crime and Safety in SA Cities 2020 is an interim update and is a precursor to the 4th edition State of Urban Safety in South Africa Report, planned for 2021. With the aim of enabling continuity in evidence-based planning and implementation by city administrations and other actors with a role in the promotion of safer cities, this edition analyses the state of crime and violence in nine of South Africa’s major cities: Johannesburg, Cape Town, eThekwini, Ekurhuleni, Tshwane, Nelson Mandela Bay, Mangaung, Buffalo City and Msunduzi.

What we’ve learned through knowledge management within the South African-German development cooperation

South African cities need to invest in public spaces that are truly co-created through social engineering processes. These need to be grounded in quality community participation processes which begin at the conception of the project, carries on when the project is handed over, and continues in different ways to ensure ownership and positive social activation of these spaces.

State capture at the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA) has led to the dysfunction of the commuter rail system. PRASA employs approximately 434 security personnel in the Western Cape. However, there are huge problems with these security contractors.The terrible legacy of those that engaged in State Capture will take years to undo. Commuters need to see improvements. A lot needs to be done regarding safety and security in trains.

Fieldwork is not an easy practice but conducting it in high crime communities is a daunting task. This piece discusses the challenges faced during a longitudinal survey attempt that took place in Gugulethu; and how researchers attempted to handle these challenges.

How can a participatory approach enable a better understanding of the ways in which identity and intersecting inequalities block accountability processes? This is the question that the Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation has been exploring in their most recent action research process with the Delft Safety Group. And this was the question that catalysed the development of a novel participatory visual research method - hand mapping. Read more in this blog by Gill Black, co-director and leader of health participation at the Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation.

The creation of a safe, non-commercial and welcoming public space in Cape Town is necessary to challenge the barriers cemented in the past which taint our experience of the present and keep us apart.

The aggregate manner in which the crime data and statistics are presented masks the disproportionate nature of violent crime in South Africa, which for decades has been concentrated in about 20 per cent of police precincts. Most of these high crime precincts are densely populated, infrastructurally marginalised and characterised by elevated levels of poverty. Therefore, in seeking to gauge a more informed analysis of crime a focus on high crime precincts provides a more enlightening touchstone for the state of violent crime in South Africa.