Police outside Ferguson Police Department, November 2014. Demotix/Bryan Sutter. All rights reserved.The massive popular protests that followed the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner have brought attention to questions of police reform in the United States. In debating how the US should restructure law enforcement institutions to decrease violence and increase accountability, we can look to the implementation of programmes in other countries that have attempted reform. South Africa – a nation grappling with contemporary racial divisions and a historical legacy of institutional racism – provides such a model.
An institution of tyranny
After transitioning to democracy in 1994, South Africa established community-policing institutions that helped law enforcement gain the trust of a citizenry that had viewed the police as the militarized and illegitimate hands of the apartheid state. In many ways, the South African case is fundamentally different from the problem of police abuse in the US. Police brutality in South Africa was condoned, if not endorsed, by the apartheid state. And the scale of human rights violations committed on the part of the South African Police Service (SAPS) was wide-ranging and profound, making a comparison to police violence in the US difficult. Nonetheless, Americans can draw valuable lessons from successful police reform in a nation that confronted much tougher challenges in repairing community-police relations.
Transforming law enforcement was at the top of the governance reform agenda of the new democratic South Africa. By 1994, the South African Police Service held very little institutional legitimacy in the eyes of the public, as they had been the ruthless executors of the apartheid system. Established by the ruling National Party (NP) in 1948, apartheid was a racialized economic, political, and legal order, intended to secure access to social benefits, economic opportunities, political power and resources for white South Africans, while limiting or denying access to such goods for non-white citizens. Moreover, the system was designed to ensure that the labour of non-whites (and, in particular, black South Africans) was made available to white producers.
