This paper analyzes police-community relations in South Africa. It focuses on the way that South Africa's political context has impacted these relations. It also looks at the ways in which the police are understood both by communities and by the police themselves, and how this impacts on expectations of the police. The paper draws on international experiences to provide recommendations for improving police-community relations.
The bulk of the police reforms introduced in the 1990-91 period in South Africa were initiated by the government or the South African Police itself. The new rhetoric of police reform, centring on the concept of "community-supported policing," continues to dominate the public debate about the transition and the longer term reform agenda. This paper examines the relationship between state and civil society in the process of police reform in the transitional period in South Africa.
This paper examines the concept of human rights in the area of mental health. It does this in four steps. Firstly, it provides a brief examination of the shift from institutionalisation to community care and the violation of human rights that occurred in the process. Secondly, it defines the concept of human rights in the field of mental health. Thirdly, it provides a discussion of the hegemonic medical approach to mental health and the undermining of human rights that followed. Finally, the paper offers a brief focus on the role of the socio-political context in the understanding and distribution of human rights.
This paper provides the results of a comprehensive survey on relations between police and the community in Grahamstown, as well as a series of recommendations informed by this research. The research was commissioned by the Commission on Policing in Grahamstown.
This paper seeks to analyse some of the dynamics which shape the character and intensity of violent behaviour in black schools, particularly in the years after February 1990. In order to examine this violence, this paper will attempt to revisit and re-examine the crisis in the township schools of the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vaal Triangle.
The year 1991 witnessed the continuation of trends in political violence which had been set in motion in the wake of the State President's speech in February of that preceding year. This paper argues that this violence occurred in the context of the deregulation of repressive forms of social control at precisely the time at which the process of political transition heralded an intensified political contest.