ABSTRACT
Policing in South Africa is something of a national obsession largely because crime is one of the country’s most pressing policy problems. This fixation may or may not be healthy or appropriate because, as students of the subject will know, the extent to which policing impacts on crime levels is by no means well-established. This is certainly true of the developed world where scholarly debate about the role of the police in preventing crime has produced many a peer-reviewed article, but in the developing world, matters are, if anything, worse. In developing countries, after all, crime problems are often far worse than in the developed world, and police services are frequently staffed by poorly trained personnel, usually lack basic resources and infrastructure, and suffer from severe deficits in both discipline and professional integrity.1 That being so, the link between policing and crime levels in the developing world should be even less clear.
