ABSTRACT
What is played out in the interface between police and communities is referred to by Steinberg as a script. This script, he says, is written by the audience (communities) rather than the playwrights (the police). When the police don’t play the right lines, they are thrown off the stage and the audience (community members) become the actors. As Steinberg and others have shown, across South Africa, communities (both rich and poor) have come together to protect themselves from threats to their security. Their defense is neighborly cohesion, sometimes expressed as ethnic solidarity and sometimes based on ties that are political or traditional. What we see in Steinberg’s book
The Established Police Narrative in Post-Apartheid South Africa 155 Situating the Police as the Thin Blue Line 159 A Community Policing Model for Emergent and Postconflict States 162 Concluding Comments 165 References 165 Endnotes 168
is that community initiatives have led to real reductions in the levels of crime in areas where there is social efficacy (Adams & Serpe, 2000). In the face of this, the police do not retreat from the center stage or try to find new roles for themselves. Instead, unsurprisingly, they continue to try to assert their authoritative position. They don’t want to be made fools of, nor do they want to be seen as having failed as building the community policing project.
