South Africa currently faces an urgent and grave violent crime problem. To tackle the crisis, law enforcement agencies are increasingly turning to evidence-based policing (EBP) approaches. These draw on research and evidence to determine which strategies work best to reduce crime.
Much like in medicine, using researched and tested approaches creates greater certainty that new interventions are likely to succeed. This enhances policing methods and promotes efficient allocation of resources. But can these strategies be scaled up across the country and made part of everyday practice?
In 2024 the South African Police Service (SAPS), Western Cape Government and City of Cape Town piloted an evidence-based hotspot patrol strategy in four police station areas in Cape Town. The exercise was carried out with the support of the Institute for Security Studies and Hanns Seidel Foundation. The results were impressive. Violent crimes in hotspots decreased more than five times as much as in areas that received business-as-usual policing.
But these promising results mean little if strategies are not translated into institutional practice. Policing scholars increasingly argue that measuring success should not only involve demonstrating that a strategy works, but showing that it can be integrated into routine operations.
This has led to a distinction between ‘first-generation’ studies that focus on scientific experiments, and ‘second-generation’ research that places greater emphasis on practically embedding new strategies.
Following the success of the hotspots policing pilots, South Africa is tentatively entering a second generation of EBP research and implementation. Rather than just testing strategies, the SAPS, Western Cape Government and City of Cape Town have taken steps towards institutionalising and scaling approaches.
SAPS has incorporated EBP into its Annual Performance Plan and has directed an initial group of 11 stations to adopt the strategy in the Western Cape this year. The province’s Law Enforcement Advancement Programme is also adopting the patrol strategy, and the SAPS, province and city have designed tools to track and measure how patrols impact crime. EBP is also part of the city’s metro police cadet curriculum, with plans to extend training to managers.
However, significant challenges confront the expansion of EBP across the country. In the few locations where the approach has been deployed so far, the focus has largely been on implementing evidence-based hotspot patrols, which are only one of many useful EBP approaches.
What needs to happen to support the broader adoption and institutionalisation of EBP strategies in South Africa?
Researchers globally have grappled with this question, and have identified several critical factors essential to making EBP part of everyday policing. These include leadership support, collaboration with researchers, officer training, access to accurate and reliable data, and cultural change among public safety agencies and scholars.
In South Africa there have been promising developments in this regard. EBP enjoys leadership support at national, provincial and city levels, and police and safety institutions are increasingly open to collaborating with researchers. There is also a growing uptake of EBP training, with the City of Cape Town recently training over 800 new metro police cadets in the approach.
However, more emphasis must be placed on accurate data recording to support the implementation of EBP strategies. This includes ensuring that stations record precise crime location details, such as correct street names and numbers. Reliable information is a prerequisite to adopting evidence-based and data-driven strategies.
Both SAPS and metro policing in South Africa are dominated by strict hierarchical organisational structures that often restrict independent thought and innovation. Effort needs to be invested in fostering critical enquiry and reflective thinking among police officials and supervisors.
A shift is also required among criminologists and researchers, who often lack the skills needed to collaborate effectively and help institutionalise evidence-based approaches. The gaps include poor knowledge of operational practices on the ground and an inability to communicate concepts in plain language.
Researchers also tend to prefer disseminating their findings in academic journals at the cost of building relations with policing organisations and creating entry points for their research. They also need to use communication channels that police officials are likely to read.
When considering the uptake of EBP, it’s important to remember that this is an evolving process rather than a defined goal or achievement. The process entails collaboration, negotiation and dialogue between multiple stakeholders ranging from police officials to crime analysts in various state enforcement agencies, and researchers. These interactions gradually shift attitudes to policing and lead to new strategies, technologies and infrastructures.
By measuring South Africa’s position in the process rather than just focusing on the destination, the country is on an early yet sound path to adopting, refining and embedding evidence-based policing.
Written by Vanya Gastrow, Senior Researcher, Justice and Violence Prevention, ISS Pretoria.
Republished with permission from ISS Africa. The original article can be found here.
