Innovations for Successful Societies
		





AN INITIATIVE OF
THE WOODROW WILSON SCHOOL OF PUBLIC AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS 
AND THE BOBST CENTER FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE



Series: 		Policing
	
Interview no.:		C1


Interviewee: 		Gareth Newham
      			Adviser to the Gauteng Provincial MEC 
      			(Member of the Executive Council) on Community Safety	
		
Interviewer:		Daniel Scher	

Date of Interview:	22 January 2008

Location:		Standard Bank Building
			Johannesburg, South Africa
					
		



Innovations for Successful Societies, Bobst Center for Peace and Justice
Princeton University, 83 Prospect Avenue, Princeton, New Jersey, 08544, USA www.princeton.edu/successfulsocieties



DANIEL SCHER:	OK, my name is Daniel Scher.  I'm the associate director of the Institutions for Fragile States project.  And I'm here with Gareth Newham in Johannesburg on the 22nd of January, 2008.  

GARETH NEWHAM:	You have.

SCHER:	Excellent.  So with that out of the way, let's go right into it.  And before we actually get into the meat of the interview I'd just like to ask you a little bit about your background and your career trajectory.  Would you mind just describing the position that you hold now?

NEWHAM:	I'm the policy and strategy adviser, to the Gauteng MEC - Member of the Executive Cabinet for Community Safety. In this position I have been responsible for developing a crime prevention strategy for the Gauteng province -- provincial government.  I also manage a variety of projects aimed at strengthening the provincial governments' capacity to undertake police oversight and crime prevention.

SCHER:	OK, and how did you get into this position?  What were the kind of jobs that you held before now?

NEWHAM:	I've been doing this since the beginning of March 2006, so almost two years.  But for about seven years before this I worked for an NGO called the Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation - CSVR - in Johannesburg as a project manager - first a researcher, then project manager -- on similar issues.  On police oversight, police management, and crime prevention issues.  During that time, in 2002 I completed a master's at Wits University at their Graduate School for Public and Development Management.  My dissertation was on management for the promotion of police integrity at the Hillbrow Police Station, an inner-city police station that recorded some of the highest levels of violent crime in the country. It also struggled with police corruption.  My dissertation focused on how to combat corruption, looking at organizational culture, current management systems, attitudes and morale of the police officers in the South African Police Service at a local level in the context of democratic reform.  For three years prior to that, ending in 1998, I worked for IDASA, the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, where I established and managed a project called the Provincial Parliamentary  Monitoring Project in the provinces of Mpumalanga, Limpopo, North West and Gauteng to monitor and conduct research on the development and functioning of provincial legislatures.  This project looked specifically at how these institutions held the provincial executives to account, drafted legislation and how they managed community participation. And prior to that, in 1996, I worked for IDASA monitoring and writing reports on Colonel Eugene de Kock trial, which is, he was a police hit squad leader during apartheid facing 121 criminal charges including eight for murder.  At this time I was also doing a lot of work for a task team that had been established to develop a national witness protection program.  I got into that through doing research for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission through CSVR on two particular areas, establishment of a witness protection program for the Truth Commission program and looking at establishing investigation units that would support the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  So that's when I first got into crime and policing.  Before that I studied at the University of Cape Town. In 1994 I completed post-graduate an honors degree in political studies during which I focused on southern African politics and security. My honors dissertation was on democracy and the military, civil-military relations, how South Africa was going to subvert the power of the military to parliament and to democratic government or at least make sure there was democratic control over the military.  During this year I also worked for our Independent Electoral Commission - IEC - as a supervisor of 11 election monitor whom I was tasked to deploy at various election rallies throughout the Wynberg municipile district in the months running up to and during our first democratic election.  Prior to that I majored in organizational psychology and political studies as part of an undergraduate degree in Social Sciences, also at the University of Cape Town.  That's a brief overview of what I've done.

SCHER:	So you got into policing from your work on the military?  It was just a natural progression of jobs and tasks?

NEWHAM:	Yeah, an interest in security issues.  And then really it was the work around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that got me interested in issues to do with policing, investigation units, how to investigate political crimes, and issues of witness protection, rule of law, that kind of thing.  This led to my interest in the criminal justice system and policing in particular.

SCHER:	And now at this stage in your work on policing, what would you say your specialty is within the broader criminal justice framework?

NEWHAM:	Well, I focus mainly on police reform, police leadership and management, and strategy development and policymaking with a focus on violent crime reduction.  I have also focused extensively on police accountability, both internal and external.  So, accountability within the police organization relating to performance and discipline management.  And external accountability, looking at improving the role and functioning of civilian oversight bodies in our context to ensure that police deliver services effectively and efficiently and combat crime within the law. The Department of Community Safety for which the MEC is responsible is the primary civilian oversight body over the police in the province. So that's probably more or less what I focus on most of the time.

SCHER:	Fair enough.  Something I was quite interested in is that you said you came here in March 2006.

NEWHAM:	Yeah.

SCHER:	And prior to that you'd done a lot of writing on a lot of policy recommendations.  And now you've moved to the implementation side of things.  Would you mind talking a little bit about that shift, how you went from researcher, external researcher, to actually being involved in implementation?

NEWHAM:	Well, fortunately the shift was not that big because through the work that I did at CSVR, I had gained experience in implementing the recommendations that emerged as a result of my research.  I typically used a participation action research approach - sometimes referred to as PAR - in much of my research on the police organization at station or area level. So when conducting research on the management of corruption at the Hillbrow police station for example, once key elements of a strategy were agreed to, I would then assist the police management with planning and implementing some of what had been agreed to.  This allowed me detailed insight into the difficulties and constraints facing police management in terms of time availability, resources, capacity and sometimes lack of support from higher administrative levels when trying to introduce new systems or processes. This experience proved very useful when I started working in this current position as I had already developed a network of senior police managers with whom I had built a trusting and working relationship at different levels in the organization. It was always clear that I was an outsider to the police and at first there was some suspicion because I was working in a Human Rights orientated NGO, but over time as we got to know each other it was clear that we largely wanted to achieve the same objectives and I could bring value to the officers and police stations or components I was working with.  It was because of this experience I think,  that I was offered a job as the adviser to the MEC.  The Executive Director of CSVR had attended university with the MEC during the 1980's and when the MEC was appointed, the CSVR Executive Director arranged for us to meet and discuss ways in which we could share our research findings on policing with his office. We met a couple of times, and then he would phone on occasion to discuss a particular issue he was facing in relation to the police and for summaries of documents I had written or a short briefing document relating to a policy question he was considering. He would also ask if I could refer him to other people in the field that I'd worked with.  So over a period of a year, we built a bit of a working relationship because the department at the time didn't have adequate research capacity.  When he arrived at the department in 2004 there wasn't a research unit.  It was doing a lot more community mobilization work and handling complaints against police.  Some kind of -- I wouldn't call it investigation, but recording complaints against the police and trying to see what the reason behind the complaints were and resolve the complaint.  So there wasn't the capacity to think about policy and strategy in terms of thinking about what should provincial governments do, how do we better interpret the constitutional mandate, how do we improve police oversight. At the time it was great for me to have this relationship because working for an independent public interest organization it was often difficult to get politicians and government officials to read and consider our research and recommendations on policing. And then after a year of largely informal contact he asked me if I would be prepared to do this full-time working in his office.  I thought it was a brilliant opportunity to influence government policy making and so I accepted.  And it's been interesting because I don't hold a position in the department.  I don't have a post.  I'm not actually within the bureaucracy.  I work within his office as a special adviser, which is a political office.  My formal title is a special projects consultant and my key role is still to provide him with policy advice.  So I identify gaps or shortcomings in the way the department undertakes police oversight and I help define projects, conceptualize them, and assist department line managers to implement them.  But I don't control budgets, I don't directly manage anybody. Once a project has been accepted by the MEC I will assist the department in understanding and implementing it.  So I write a lot of concept, project planning documents and briefing documents and l provide a lot of ongoing advice to people in the department as well.  I work very closely with the head of department and the chief directors, the various senior heads of various components, in thinking through and practically developing some of the projects.  A lot of the stuff that we've been doing is quite innovative and comes from the Gauteng safety strategy.  For the first time we developed a -- it's called the Gauteng safety strategy, which I can give you a copy of.  My first task when starting in this position was to develop the Gauteng Safety Strategy. It's the first time that the provincial government has ever had a crime prevention strategy, tailor made for the provincial government, that seeks to give guidance to a range of provincial government departments, the provincial cabinet, about how to reduce crime in Gauteng.  During the 2004 elections, the Premier of the province highlighted crime as one of his top priorities along with reducing poverty and unemployment. Although it is the smallest out of the nine provinces in geographical size, it has approximately 20% of the country's population, contributes to about 40% of the country's GDP and records approximately half of the country's serious and violent crime.   And so there was an idea that they needed to have a specific crime reduction policy or strategy that responded to the particular dynamics in the province.  Up until then provincial governments had not really seen it as their role to address crime as the key criminal justice departments, the police, the Justice Department and correctional services, were national departments. There was mention of provincial governments doing work around crime prevention in the National Crime Prevention Strategy, which was adopted in 1996 by national cabinet.  Again later in the 1998 the safety and security policy, white paper, they talk about provincial structures and provincial roles.  But it was not really well developed and most provinces didn't really have the capacity to do much more than their narrowly prescribed constitutional mandate, which is to monitor police conduct, oversee effectiveness and efficiency of police service delivery, assess visible policing and promote community-police relations.  So it was interesting to think through how the province could play a more proactive role. The strategy has four key pillars including improving the quality of policing, promoting social crime prevention across the provincial government, encouraging community participation in crime prevention and building the institutional capacity of the provincial government to achieve the objectives contained in the first three pillars.  So what we were doing in Gauteng was to expand the role of provincial government to play a much more proactive and ongoing role in crime prevention and police reform.  We now have an eight-year strategy.  It was adopted last year, sorry, adopted in August 2006 and will run until 2014.  And with clear objectives that should -- it's really about building the capacity of the provincial government to better engage with not only its constitutional oversight role of the police, but also to look at how other departments such as social welfare, education, health can play a role in ameliorating the risk factors that lead to people committing crimes.  That kind of thing.

SCHER:	OK, excellent.  Well, with your permission, I'd like to dig into some of the more meat of the interview and the types of things that we're interested in.  And I think it would be great if we could start with internal management issues, seeing as this is something that you've worked on quite extensively.  So very broad question.  Internal management talking about things like promotion systems, disciplinary systems, and also more basic recordkeeping and accounting systems, those information management things, would you mind -- I realize you've worked on a number of these types of initiatives.  And you mentioned that you're working on some quite innovative programs here.  Would you mind talking about a few of these programs that you've been involved with?  Just basically start from whichever seems -- start from wherever suits you, because I realize it's a very broad question.

NEWHAM:	OK, may we start where I'm at - what I am working on now - improving police accountability to impact on performance.  We've had to look at what information is available from the police and how to manage this information - look at how decisions get made, what information is used to make decisions, how do the police managers themselves make assessments of what the problems are, what the challenges are, that are making a difference.  I think South Africa has made a lot of progress in terms of our technological capabilities.  So the police in South Africa are very -- they have a lot of standing orders, a lot of regulations, literally thousands of them, and they document a huge amount of information.  The main challenge I think is to ensure the integrity of the information, because if you get -- what typically seems to happen is a lot of the people doing actual police work are not the ones actually capturing the information onto the systems.  It's data typists, civilian staff, who might not fully understand the importance of why this information needs to be captured.  They don't ever see it being used.  And so I think there are challenges in developing and using police information management systems.  And a key challenge is to ensure that there's data integrity.  That stuff is being looked at all the time, but it is a bit of a challenge.  So to use a hypothetical example when you look at arrest rates, arrest rates are just one measure of police performance, if you have two police stations doing a joint operation and they, at the end of the operation they have made a 100 arrests, so they made a total of 100 arrests.  One challenge in the past was that they will go back and then each station would capture 100 arrests into their station data systems. However, this is not an accurate reflection on that individual stations arrest and it will also reflect on the system as 200 arrests on the total provincial arrest figure.   So dealing with that kind of stuff is a critical issue because you need information to know where your challenges are, and you need to know what is really making a difference.  Furthermore, arrest rates in themselves are a weak indicator of police performance.  Police should only really be arresting people where there is a reasonable suspicion that they have committed a crime or will commit a crime and there is a good chance that they won't appear before a court if not arrested.  The extent to which arrests are a good indicator of police performance against priority crimes depends on what happens to those arrests afterwards. You want to get a sense of how many people arrested were also charged and appeared before court, how many of those cases get withdrawn, and what are the conviction rates.  So you start getting a better sense of the effectiveness and efficiency of the use of your policing resources in tackling people involved in committing priority crimes.  That's then a key issue and that's what we've been doing work on, is accessing those police data systems and tracking key data sets for all the police stations in Gauteng.  When you're talking about information management  for guiding police decision making, it needs to be really explicitly said.  There have to be very clear standards for data integrity and a deliberate management focus around capturing information correctly.  That in itself needs to be an ongoing issue that the senior management of the police organization prioritize.  And I think that we still have a lot of unevenness.  Some stations are very good.  Some stations are very bad.  So sometimes you can get very accurate information from a station, get a very good sense of what is being done, and other stations that's not really the case.  It also has to do with computer literacy and the extent to which the police themselves think it's important.  And a lot of this stuff is seen as bureaucratic by the police.  I think one of the worst jobs any police officer has is paperwork.  They hate filling in documents and sending in returns and that.  But it's important and I think that police leadership need to explain why it's important and that the stations that do this properly and pay attention to this issue see the benefits of it.  As a station commissioner you can show that you're underresourced given your crime challenges and you can argue more effectively for additional resources because the information upon which resourcing decisions are made is accurate, rather than a system where all stations get a certain number of vehicles handed out to them and senior management just hopes that those vehicles are being used effectively.  Management need to be able to see that if we give you ten extra vehicles you'll be able to effect so many more arrests or you'll attend to so many more complaints in a shorter time period, your complaint response time will be shorter.  It will become possible for police managers to better assess the actual efficiencies that emerge out of improved resource capacities.  Because the police here and everywhere else tend to always want more resources.  There's never enough resources for the police to actually really tackle crime in a country that's experiencing a high crime rate.  So that's one area of management that I think is pretty important.  It also helps with accountability.  So you can quickly make decisions about whether you see local managers performing well or not -- and that really just gives you a warning flag to ask more questions.  Why are they not performing well?  Is it because they do not have experience, they don't have the training, they don't have the resources?  Are there problems in the community that they're working with?  But if you don't have accurate performance information you won't even know whether they're working well or not and you'll tend to treat different police stations the same.  You'll give them the same resources or you won't really know whether things are changed or improving or not.  Look, I am very aware of the limitations of performance management systems when it comes to policing, including that if there is too much reliance on them they can lead to perverse outcomes, but they certainly have an important role to play in my opinion. At the end of the day police can play a very important role in building societies, or they can also play a role in undermining the rule of law.  So the more information you have about what police are doing and how well they're doing it, the better you're able to actually engage with that and improve it.  And the less information, the less you're able to do it, and you never really know if things are happening or not.  I think the other area that goes back to accountability is the issue of police discipline.  A lot of my work has been around what I call police integrity, which is really about, I suppose, police doing exactly what they're saying they're going to do.  For example, upholding the constitutional values, upholding the law, upholding their own policies.  And we get a lot of complaints in South Africa.  You see a lot of that in the newspapers about police not responding on time or not responding at all, treating people badly, not investigating cases, not interviewing witnesses.  A whole range of things that they're not doing.  And that is a serious problem if you're trying to address a high crime rate because that means that you might have a great constitution in place, great policies in place, but implementation is not happening.  When police don't act well or act in ways that will undermine public trust then you have a breakdown in the rule of law. I think South Africa's real challenge is to build the rule of law.  I don't think for a lot of South Africans prior to the end of apartheid, the rule of law really meant much.  During apartheid the law was seen as an immoral set of regulations.  So we have much to do to build the rule of law.  Within a constitutional and democratic state, how the police implement their policies and enforce the law that is critical to that.  If they do it impartially the law will gain more respect.  But it doesn't take many police officers to be corrupt or do things impartially, or with bias, to break that down for many people.  One area that I've looked at a lot, because I thought it was an area that wasn't given enough attention, was the issue of police discipline.  And if you look at all the notions of police reform in South Africa, there was a focus on demilitarization, which is an important change from a paramilitary style police force that was used to oppress people for political purposes through to building a police agency that provides services to all people.  There was definitely a need to demilitarize so that you could allow for hopefully more innovative problem-solving policing, police officials at the local level that are more close and able to work with a community.  A lot more flexible than paramilitary structures typically are.  And also don't see people and crime problems with a military mindset, which is a very different mindset to what a civilian policing mindset should be.  However, in the previous militarized culture of the police there was a strong culture of discipline linked to the rank structure. Unfortunately this was changed without being replaced with a system that was easily understandable by the police managers themselves.  So in many cases discipline did break down.  And this led to a lot of the service delivery problems and some of the corruption challenges that we face, because the police still have a very strong police culture, but the standards of conduct and what's acceptable and not acceptable is not always as clear as you would think it should be.  And so you have a lot of problems with things like drinking on duty, absenteeism, that kind of thing.  I think that there are fewer problems now than in the 1990's but we've certainly had big problems for the last ten years in a lot of different parts of South Africa in the police.  A new police discipline system was introduced in 1997 and it's a fair system but requires a lot more work from supervisors and managers to discipline people than what was required in the past.  During apartheid, police managers could either have you dismissed or punished without really giving you much of a fair opportunity to be heard or to challenge it.  With the introduction of unions in the police and fair labor practices with democracy in South Africa, police managers have to be a lot more proactive and consistent in managing discipline.  So when they start seeing things going wrong, small things, they should proactively engage, draw people's attention to the problem in a meeting and document the outcomes of those meetings. Use discipline incrementally such as initially having a counseling session before moving on to issuing verbal or written warnings.  So it requires a lot more bureaucracy.  And I don't think there was initially a lot of focus on that.  Police managers don't like disciplining people.  It certainly can lead to tensions within shifts and different units, which lead to other problems around performance, with some officers not doing what they should be doing because they feel they're being picked on if you try and discipline them.  So I have conducted quite a bit of research around the challenges of managing discipline in a reforming police organization.  And I think there was really an absence or inadequate attention was paid to this issue from a leadership level as to the strategic value in developing disciplinary systems to improve police conduct and performance.  As a result we've been promoting managers without adequately training them and assessing their capabilities to manage people. If you'd been a low level supervisor - a non-commissioned officer as an inspector and you applied to be promoted to middle management commissioner officer as a captain - the decision to promote you was never made based on any assessment as to whether you understood or used the discipline or performance accountability processes properly.  In fact how you managed wasn't even looked at at all.  For lower level supervisors being promoted into middle management all that was looked at was how many years you had been in your current post, whether you had been subject to any discipline, the opinion of your direct supervisor and the affirmative action status of the vacant posts.  Promotion into middle management was largely a paper exercise so they were promoting a lot of people whose skills as managers were not objectively assessed.  And I think that's a problem.  You've got to be able to demonstrate that you have the ability to supervise and take action in the interest of organization before you should be promoted say to a more senior level.  And that's not about only knowing what the regulations say.  The focus must be on whether or not you've actually been able to apply the regulations when necessary.  And those kinds of things weren't really being looked at carefully enough.  So that's another area I've spent a lot of time looking at to assess what can be done and how that links to the challenge of police corruption.  Because as soon as there's a sense within the police that discipline is weak, a certain portion of the police officers will start using their powers for their personal gain, and that can start off very simple with just visiting certain shops because they give you free lunch or certain petrol stations because you get coffee in winter all the way to where people are start paying police officials to act in their interest.  And then that's a huge in for organized criminal syndicates to start influencing police officers. 

SCHER:	There's quite a few things I'd like to follow up on there.  Firstly just a brief question.  So you mentioned that the use of the disciplinary system wasn't considered in promotions.  Has that changed now?  Is that something that's being factored into promotions at this stage?

NEWHAM:	I'm not aware that the practices have changed for promotion into middle management.  The assessment process for senior management is much more rigorous and competitive as there are far fewer posts.  But promotion to the rank of Captain is still largely a paper exercise as far as I am aware.  Nevertheless, Captains can exercise a lot of power in our police service.  Some police agencies around the world use vicarious liability approach for holding supervisors and managers accountable.  So if there's a problem with corruption or discipline within a unit that requires an external investigation, an additional focus will be placed into what you did personally as a manager or supervisor to address the problem. Here, there is still too much focus on the individual who is accused of wrongdoing and not enough attention is given to the role of the person responsible for supervising that individual to ensure that they are managing properly.  Such an approach should be guiding promotions, certainly to senior ranks of captain or commissioned officers and above, because you hold a lot of power as a police supervisor or commissioned officer.  You do have a lot of authority to determine how resources are used, to ensure cases get investigated well and how those under you command exercise their powers.  If you're a head of detectives or head of any kind of crime prevention unit you have a considerable amount of power.  And I think the way managers use their discretion to ensure that the people under their direct command and control are acting within the law and regulations, and whether they are able to solve problems innovatively certainly should be an area of focus when considering if they should be promoted further or not. When you apply for promotions, they'll certainly test your knowledge on all the regulations, and you can learn all that stuff.  But I don't think there are systems in place currently to determine whether or not you manage well.  And I think that would make quite a big difference if there was more of a focus on that.  It would change the dynamics a lot.  I think a lot of the challenges faced in the police currently would be minimized if that was the case.

SCHER:	So in your role currently is that something that you're working towards?

NEWHAM:	Yeah it's one of the four key priorities within the policing pillar of the Gauteng safety strategy.  Unfortunately, we can't do anything directly around this at a national policy level given that we are a provincial department. It is at the national level where policing policy is determined. These kind of things would have to be decided on, acted on at a national level by the headquarters of police in Pretoria, their human resources would have to agree this is how we do promotions and so forth.  We can't do that. We are doing a number of things to allow us to better assess the extent and nature of the challenges managers are facing. For example, we are setting up a centralized system to trace and analyse civilian complaints against police officers.  We get around 4 to 500 complaints a year, ranging from police officers being rude all the way to serious accusations of police corruption or crime.  We send our departmental officials to sort out basic service delivery complaints and refer more serious matters to the Independent Complaints Directorate - the ICD - which is a civilian led agency established in terms of the Constitution to investigate all cases of all deaths as a result of police action or while in police custody and other serious allegations. Interestingly most civilian complaints against the police go directly to the police themselves. In addition people complaint to our Chapter 9 institutions, so called because they are established in accordance to Chapter 9 of our Constitution.  These include the Human Rights Commission, the Public Protector and Gender Commission for example.  So there is information on police conduct at a number of different institutions and nowhere is this centralized and analyzed for trends and patterns.  So we have set up a system where we can track complaints that come directly to us and see what happens to those complaints, how long it takes to investigate the complaint and what are the what outcomes of the investigation.  This is a new system recently implemented called the Investigation and Monitoring of Police and Citizen Complaints system or IMPACC as we refer to it.  I also want to extend IMPACC to include information on complaints and disciplinary or criminal steps taken against police officials from the South African Police Service, the ICD and these other institutions.  Over time we hope to develop a database of police stations, units and police officers that consistently attract complaints.  If we that certain trends start emerging it will suggest that there may be problem there.  We want to know whether complaints are resulting in appropriate disciplinary action been taken where necessary and what the outcomes of the disciplinary process is across the province?  If we can gather all this data into a single data base for the province we will have a much better picture about police misconduct and criminality and the extent to which the internal and external accountability systems are functioning to respond to such incidents.   If we can achieve this then we would then be able to target research to identify key shortcomings and with police management, develop improved policies or initiatives to address police misconduct and criminality.  The MEC could then use the inter-ministerial forum to raise these with the National Minister for Safety and Security.  In addition if the MEC could place pressure on provincial police management to start improving systems and processes.  The Provincial Premier can actually remove provincial commissioners if he or she loses the confidence of the Provincial Executive.  So there are various ways of putting pressure on the police to start taking these things more seriously from an external point of view if such things are resisted by the police. Fortunately, we have a good working relationship with the current Provincial Police management and we are attempting to achieve the same things. 

SCHER:	That model sounds quite -- is that quite similar to the one they use in New York?  This early warning system where you collect all the information into a database?

NEWHAM:	Yeah, many of these ideas come though reading journal and policy articles on policing around the world and much of it comes from work undertaken in cities in the United States. 

SCHER:	So that's basically my question, what kind of models are you drawing from?

NEWHAM:	A lot of the comparative literature on policing or civilian oversight we get -- or is certainly the most accessible - mostly comes from the UK, America and Australia because it's written in English.  Of course it's one thing to understand what is being done or attempted in other countries and to recognize that they can work for inherently rational reasons, but another to actually implement them, given the whole range of constraints in your own country.  But I certainly look at a lot of international policing stuff to get a sense of what is happening internationally, what's possible, what could be possible here.  This can inform us how about we can move forward here.  We only started with democratic and Human Rights orientated policing since 1994 and can learn from countries that have had more experience than we have. 

SCHER:	And what are some of the constraints that you face when trying to apply these models that might be accessible in the UK, US, Australia, but perhaps not 100% applicable in the South African context?  What are the types of issues that arise?

NEWHAM:	Well, the biggest constraint often is to get the organization to try something new.  There's a lot of stuff happening already, there's a lot of bureaucracy for police managers and leadership.  And to set up a new system is a very difficult thing.  When people are -- police officers are typically very busy, certainly managers are.  And if you're managing 15 or 20 people or a station of 2 or 4 or 500 people and there's a whole lot of bureaucracy already in place leading to a massive information coming in but as I said the information might not be always accurate or it might not be a format to analyze. I don't think that the capacity to really analyze information is strong in the South African police service. So we gather a lot of information but I don't think it's often used effectively as it could be.  I don't think it's really collated properly.  I don't think it's often in user-friendly systems.  And it's not centralized and often systems are not linked.  So there's human resource data, there's police performance data, there's logistics and resource data, all in different places.  And no one's trying to link them up and saying "OK what are the links between high levels of disciplinary complaints and inefficient use of resources?" because those two systems will be in different places and they're not linked up.  So that stuff is very weak.  We've got the capacity in the sense that we have the technology and the computers and the mainframes and the databases to collect all this data but we don't have the capacity and skills to actually analyze it and use it to look at policy and management challenges, to assess whether things are changing for better or worse, I don't think it is as good or as strong as it should be.  Sometimes it's partly because the organizational culture, the people who do that - analysts - are not seen as doing real police work.  But we need analysts, people who can spend their whole day working with data, their job is to sit behind computers and analyze stuff and identify patterns and correlations and write reports.  And then people who go into police stations and make sure that the data is being captured correctly.  And actually check these systems.  And very few people join the police to do that.  So you'll typically find the components, strategic management, a lot of these types of components are very underresourced.  They might only have two or three people.  And they literally don't have the time to analyze or to do creative stuff with information that's at their disposal.  And so some of the things that we're doing here in the department is setting up systems to analyze different data sets and to try to get a better understanding about what the police are doing and the challenges they face.  So that we can develop initiatives that can improve policing in the province.  But there's generally a sense within our police agency, and I think many police agencies around the world, that it is only the people who are out on the streets in the patrol vans or making arrests, investigating criminals who are doing the real police work.  There is often a sense amongst operational managers that anybody else in the organization is just messing around or making more work for the people who are doing the real police work.  As most managers have come through the ranks they will tend to see things in this way.  That's what they like doing.  So you'll still find a lot of very senior police officers don't like working with statistics, don't like strategic planning processes, are not interested in technology and would rather go to a crime scene and direct a specific investigations than playing a more executive and strategic role.  However, I think that to police effectively this back office work is critically important.  There is a need to be more explicit about the role of a police executive?  We need senior managers at all levels who are able to work with the information at their disposal, identify where the key shortcomings are and then use the data to track whether interventions are working or not?  And ensure that this is done throughout the organization?  So it's about creating that innovative learning organization that can change and improve all the time.  For over a decade the South African police service has been through what's called transformation, a term we use to refer to police reform. A lot of the time and energy has been spent on restructuring the police organization but it this has not been guided by a clear and commonly shared vision about what the police organization should look like and what it should able to achieve.  So in some senses there is a feeling of reform fatigue. But it's interesting because there are a lot of people in the police service who have good ideas about what should be done. There are station commissioners who've done high level management courses and try out innovative approaches within their own police stations.  So there's a lot of room for innovation, but if you're thinking of about approximately 30,000 police officials in the province deployed at 130 police stations, how do you make sure that they're all doing this so that all people are getting the best possible results of policing generally and not just those who happen to live in a precinct of a very innovative station commissioner.  So those are the challenges that we're facing now.

SCHER:	So how are you trying to address those?  Perhaps identifying the people at the low level and bringing them up?  Or training the high level people on these kind of executive management courses?

NEWHAM:	Yeah there is a lot of training going on and being offered to police officials at all levels.  But that is a police responsibility.  In terms of our mandate and the pillar in the Gauteng Safety Strategy dealing with improving the quality of policing in the province, what we're doing is looking to strengthen police accountability at police stations in a way that systematically improves police performance across all stations. In addition to the system I mentioned earlier, we have started setting up a system called the Gauteng Information on Police Performance System, GIPPS. The system collects quantitative and qualitative data on crime and police performance on a monthly basis. At a provincial level we track 21 key violent and property crime indicators for the entire province. In addition we track 11 violent crime indicators such as murder, serious assault, armed robberies, vehicle hijacking, that kind of thing for each of the 130 police stations. For police performance we also collect data from the police station performance chart which gives efficiency ratings for each station.  These ratings are determined by a formula that is developed from an assessment of a range of station data such as the number of personnel and other resources they have and output measures such as numbers of arrests, numbers of cases sent to court or withdrawn, amount of contraband or stolen goods seized, etc. The system is quite advanced and has been developed for about 4 or 5 years now.  Each month the system provides each station with baselines, current standards and targets, so that station managers are able to see where things are improving or not. In addition to the efficiency ratings we also look case flow data for priority violent crimes at a provincial level. This includes numbers cases opened and what happens in those cases - how many are sent to court, or withdrawn and conviction rates.  Finally we also access total police output data on indicators such as for example the total numbers of arrests and what proportion are for priority crimes, numbers of roadblocks, search and seizure operations, suspect raids, and recoveries of illegal firearms, stolen vehicles, other stolen goods and contraband.  So that's a large scale database that we're putting together so we can answer those questions about change in performance of the police organization as a whole in Gauteng and each of the different police stations.  And then linked to that, every month we have a police station performance review session with five different police stations.  Last year we identified 30 police stations that were recording almost half of our priority crimes which are murder, rape, and armed robberies, specifically residential and business robberies and vehicle hijacking. Each month we assess the crime patterns and identify five particular police stations where we see that there are increasing or persistently high levels of our priority crimes.  We then undertake a more in-depth analysis of the performance of five of the identified stations over a six month period.  This analysis is based on the quantitative data we collect from the police data systems and qualitative data that is collected through interviews with police officials at the station. We also include information from Community Police Forums that are established within each precinct. A report is developed by the department and the station management team is called to a meeting chaired by the MEC.  The Provincial Commissioner of the police and his senior management team also attend the meetings. At this meeting the station commissioner provides an overview of the key performance challenges that they are facing in tacking the priority crimes and any strengths or good practices that they have adopted at the station. They are also expected to present a station specific strategy about how they will address the performance shortcomings over the next six months period.  After six months the same stations are called to a follow up meeting and their performance is once again assessed.  This process has been designed to allow the provincial department to systematically track police performance and practically engage police management in initiatives to improve performance at station level. Once stations have improved their performance we will move onto other stations.  We intend to review 30 stations every 6 months. This system is based on what the New York City Police Department call CompStat approach which we were able to experience first hand during a study trip to New York in April 2007.  During this trip we were fortunate enough to spend a couple of hours interviewing New York City Police Chief, Raymond Kelly and three of his deputies who explained the CompStat process and approach to us in great detail. We were also fortunate to observe a CompStat meeting and to experience how it was run and what indicators were used. From what we saw, this approach has real merit and ensures that station police management are held directly accountable for using their resources to achieve clearly defined policing objectives.  Our GIPPS system was developed between May and October 2007 and started being implemented with the first five stations being assessed in November 2007. It is not a punitive thing but more a partnership approach where ourselves, the Provincial Police Management and the station management identify what the key problems are and agree on how they will be addressed.  At the same time many police stations do amazing innovative stuff so you want to also be able to identify this, highlight it make these initiatives available to other police commanders.  And then we can also look at ways of trying to ensure that the best practices become standardized throughout the province. We are also working on developing an aggravated robbery strategy at the moment, which will be accepted, adopted by the provincial commissioner, with key protocols, identifying, highlighting specific standing orders or specific things that have to happen, and then it'll be circulated throughout all the 130 police stations.  So hopefully we'll then see greater improvements on not only arrest rates but the numbers of cases that'll go to court and end in successful convictions.  Conviction rates are too low.  Too many people, even if they get arrested, are not successfully prosecuted.

SCHER:	You mentioned a few indicators that you're looking at, reported crime and cases to court and conviction rates.  So those are the types of things that you are able to measure.  Are there any things that you wish you were able to measure?  Any indicators that you would like to be able to get hold of but for various reasons you can't?

NEWHAM:	I think it'd be useful to get down to the level of -- we are still operating at the level of stations.  And that doesn't tell you about the various components or units at the stations, doesn't tell you about the individuals at the stations.  So I would ideally like to have databases that pick up at the very least which units are doing what.  This goes back to the issue of corruption and discipline.  You'll find if you work with the police at a station level, there are good units and bad units.  And certain units are seen as punishment units.  So if you mess around or fall out of favor with certain managers, you'll get transferred to another unit, which is -- they work on night shifts or they work in worse areas or something like that.  And until you get to that level of detail you can't really hold people accountable.  It's difficult to hold a station accountable that has 2 to 5 or 600 people.  There's always going to be a limit to the extent to which you can use these kind of indicators to really understand policing.  And I've spent enough time working with police in the field to understand what a messy job it is and how regulations don't always provide the answers.  And a lot of it is to do with the personalities and the extent to which the police officer -- not even just personalities, sometimes the mood they're in that day while they're confronted with specific situation.  So that's the reality of policing.  I think if you'll be able to really track specific units or specific members in terms of what I was saying, of complaints being registered and other performance outputs as part of an early warning system, it would certainly strengthen accountability and as a result police performance. Police officials have a lot of discretion out in the field. One of the key challenges of policing is that the least experienced people, the constables, often make up the biggest numbers of police officers, and are the ones on the ground in the communities doing policing.  The people with the most experience, the commissioned officers are typically sitting in offices in police stations and meetings, or managing large scale crime prevention operations.  And police officials very quickly realize that people generally don't complain.  It's easy to intimidate people to make sure they don't complain.  Lower ranking police officials also quickly realize that even if people do lay complaints against them, the officers in charge aren't likely to be very receptive to receiving the complaints against fellow police officers.  That most police officials who are tasked with investigating another officer are not going to be thrilled to have that responsibility.   We don't have specialist investigation units that only focus on investigating police officials facing allegations of serious misconduct or corruption. So what typically happens is that a police officer facing a criminal or disciplinary complaint, will be investigated by a colleague of a higher rank, based at the same station or sometimes a nearby station. Often the investigating and subject officer will know each other and in some cases may even be friends.  Both may share feelings about how difficult policing is, that the police don't get paid enough, that long hours are worked for what is typically a thankless task, and people you're helping don't really often appreciate what you're doing.  So police organizational culture is one which is very insular.  As a result there's not much willingness generally to hold each other accountable.  Police officials would rather turn a "blind eye" to those who may not be behaving appropriately, including supervisors. Those tasked with investigating fellow officers will typically not go out of their way to trace witnesses and gather evidence. Officers that investigate other police officials too rigorously will typically find themselves ostracized by many of their colleagues.  And so you want systems that take away some of that discretion.  You also want systems that record and track all complaints so that the organization can patterns and trends that may signify deeper underlying problems. Currently, the system treats each complaint as a unique event. However, you want the public to know that they can make complaints and that even those complaints aren't substantiated because of a lack of evidence, the reason most complaints don't go anywhere, that the system has a way of identifying repeat complaints. So that if a police officer receives a certain number of similar complaints from unrelated and different people, that this will be enough of a basis to instigate closer supervision or some further review of what the officer is doing.  That you don't have to wait until person is involved in seriously bad misconduct or even criminal behavior before it gets reported. So Yeah I think a lot of the information is there, some of it's on paper and some of it's just not being collated or analyzed. But also, the system has not been designed to allow for what I am suggesting.   And I think maybe in the police there's just not a willingness to do this, because they think it will make the life of police officers more difficult than it already is.  The police officers who work in communities and on the streets believe that they know how to manage these communities.  And many police officers will say you have to bend the rules occasionally.  But when you start bending the rules, when do you stop?  I think in South Africa a lot of people would like tough policing as long as they're not on the receiving end of it, and unfortunately a lot of tough policing is targeted against those out on the streets, which are usually the poor.  So if the police are on a raid in the inner city of Johannesburg on a Friday or Saturday night, those with money will be drinking inside and will largely be left alone.  Those who don't have money will be drinking outside and will be searched and manhandled.  The tough policing approach doesn't necessarily worry about what crime you're committing.  It's primarily about taking tough action against anyone who is seen to be transgressing the law or simply not being submissive to the police.  This leads to a situation where policing start to alienate poor people from the rule of law as they feel unfairly targeted, especially when they see people with money not being subjected to the same treatment because they can pay bribes. This in turn provides space for criminality to occur and to be supported to some extent by those who feel that the system does not work for them.  So that kind of stuff needs to be checked.  And I think more sensitive your systems are in getting information about what's happening out there the better.  I think a lot of police agencies around the world battle with this issue.  Certainly in South Africa where you have high levels of illiteracy, people don't like filling in forms or can't or don't know to complain, and there's a low level of recognition that anything can be done about the police.  So widely accessible community based systems for recording and acting on community concerns relating to policing are critically important. We have Community Police Forums which were initially established to strengthen police accountability but because according to the law, the police were supposed to, establish them, they largely serve to support local police and crime reduction initiatives. 

SCHER:	I'd like to follow up a little bit more about the accountability and anticorruption initiatives.  But I just had one quick question before moving on to that.  So you said that you'd like to get unit and individual level information.  So is the problem that the information you're getting is not disaggregated, it's just at a station level, but the indicators that you're using you're actually fairly happy with?

NEWHAM:	At the moment, well we are relatively satisfied with the indicators we have and to some extent that they give us a sense of what's going on.  In many ways the indicators that I would like to have access to are not really what an external police oversight department should really be looking at.  This department should be looking at whether the strategies and tactics employed by the police are having the desired impact on priority crimes. We should also be looking at whether the internal accountability systems are generally functioning properly and assessing community concerns about the police. I think that ideally it should be police management who are driving everything that I have mentioned in terms of improving police performance and conduct.  They should be able to quickly identify officers that are facing some problem and have systems in place to tell them if this is an aberration or possibly part of a broader pattern.  So if an officer loses a weapon or is facing an allegation of misconduct, the supervisor would have a system that tells them quickly about the history of this officer. Whether they have been in the police for 5 or 30 years, the supervisor should quickly be able to tell whether they have lost or damaged other equipment or whether they have had previous complaints laid against them or faced previous disciplinary action.  Previous research on disciplinary files has shown extreme cases where an officer had up to nine cases of drinking on duty, disciplinary cases on their files.  But because they have been redeployed or had different supervisors at different times, each case has been treated as a completely isolated incident as if this never happened before.  So the manager doesn't know that this is an ongoing problem.  But a system should be in place to tell each manager immediately that this has happened before. Because there are a lot of transfers within the police and people move around a lot, you don't always have the luxury to get to know somebody over a period of time to know if they've got a drinking problem for instance, that's an example, or if there's a number of allegations that they steal from crime scenes for instance is another one.  And a lot of police managers aren't even willing to go through the process of investigating fully and taking the necessary steps. They won't even try and check the file of the official.  So sometimes when they get complaints from the public, where people actually go to a police station and make a point of seeing the manager of this unit because this guy did X, Y and Z, a lot of managers see that as more of a public relations exercise to placate the complainant, and make promises they'll look into it and do something.  But that's really it.  They won't necessarily write up a form and formally register the complaint, they won't necessarily take a statement, and they won't set a formal process in place.  Some supervisors and managers them won't actually receive any complaints, they just tell the complainant to go to the Independent Complaints Directorate and they don't even want to listen to complaints.  So there's a need for a standard management approach to ensure that all police managers record, register and respond to a complaint from a member of the public against a police officer in a manner that identifies and solves the underlying problem. Those are the kinds of indicators that the police themselves should be looking at.  This department should only be looking at provincial and station indicators. If we see that a station is not performing well, then it should be the role of the provincial and station police managers to proactively identify where the problems are and address them.  But we tend to start moving into the managerial area because you see managerial weaknesses.  And so you want to compensate for that.  This is why we introduced GIPPS, our version of CompStat. However, CompStat is actually an internal management system and process.  It's not an external process.  But we have introduced GIPPS station reviews in the hope that the benefits of this approach will be seen by the senior police managers here, so they'll start doing it themselves.  Because at the end of the day they're the ones who have the authority to take action against under-performing police personnel and make decisions about resource distribution to stations.  We have no authority, the provincial political head here, the MEC, has no authority to instruct police to do anything.  He can't tell them to run certain operations, to take action against errant police officials or to move resources about.  He can and does influence them broadly because he has political authority and recognize that the government is elected by the people and the MEC has a role to play in communicating community concerns and encouraging action from the police.  We also work with them and highlight data shows emerging trends and patterns from the analysis we do, and then on the basis of a collective understanding of the challenge jointly agree on an intervention. For instance in 2006 during the first half of the year we saw dramatic increases in various robberies such as residential and business robberies. In addition crime on trains was increasing as was taxi violence. Over a few weeks we met with the senior managers, and they agreed that these are problems and agreed that there had to be a specific strategy to tackle the increases that were occurring.  In consultation with us the police developed Operation Iron Fist, which was a six months high police visibility operation targeting key crime hot-spots. We then monitored and evaluated strategy using both their indicators and a public opinion survey and provided feedback as to what appeared to have worked and what did not.  I think it was the first time this approach had been used by our Department. But in many ways I think that the most important challenge is substantially strengthen overall management and leadership in the police.  There are certainly a lot of very good people in the police, but sometimes they are not in the best positions to express their talent.  So some of what has to be done to promote or deploy those people to more strategic positions. 

SCHER:	Do you have any thoughts on how you do that?  How are you going about finding those good people and moving them up the ranks?

NEWHAM:	I think one of the key problems with promotions in the police is that it is too post specific. So if you're a captain you want to become a superintendent, you look for where all the superintendent post are, but you might be a captain who spent the last ten years specializing as a crime prevention officer, and a post opens up in detectives or something.  You might have once done a detective course ten years ago so you've got the basics, and you apply for that post, and if you come across knowing all the regulations the best that you'll get that post.  So you have situations where you get people who go into posts where they don't actually have experience necessary for that post.  They have enough experience with the police and did very well doing what they were doing, but they want the rank, and the only way they can improve their salary is get promoted to a higher rank.  So I think there's a need to revisit the entire promotion system and career pathing system.  For instance I think only 19% of our current police officials are detectives.  There's not many posts for detectives if they want to move up.  You should be able to get adequate salary increases based on performance and allowances for where you work, what you do, not just on what position you hold.  A lot of people don't like being managers.  So you might have an incredibly good detective, who works day in and day out to solve criminal cases, but this detective would hate sitting at a desk managing ten other detectives.  But the only way he's going to get a better salary increase is when he's sitting behind a desk after being promoted into a high ranking position.  This will allow for better cars, better housing allowances, but then this detective is not actually investigating cases but rather managing others investigating cases.  And some of the best police officers don't make good managers. They don't like managing discipline and the responsibilities that come with management. So you've got to have a way of assessing those who would be good managers, who are able to work with statistics and don't have problems with sitting in meetings and recognize the importance of that for the organization on one hand, but that shouldn't be the only way you get improved salaries.  There should be options for people who might want to spend 30 years doing operational work and get rewarded for their experience, and can even maybe even earn more than junior officers, because of their experience.  And so those are the kind of things I think that are often -- when you have big centralized police agencies like we have, there are policies that are very blunt.  For example, this particular rank gets paid this amount and that's it.  So if you're sitting in a small rural town in the Karoo desert and you see hardly any crime or you're working in the heart of Hillbrow in the inner-city of Johannesburg and you're dealing with 15 murders in a weekend, you're pretty much going to get paid the same.  If you're a detective confronting people who are violent criminals or you are basically guarding the SAP 13, which is the exhibit storeroom at a police station, and in the same rank you pretty much get the same pay.  Now the incentives for going after serious violent criminals and getting the same pay as someone who's not doing that, so you've got to start saying look we've got to pay you for what you're doing, we've got to recognize the importance of what you're doing, and so those things, there's not enough nuance in the police at the moment for that.  People really don't get paid for their performance and for the dangers they're facing.  There are danger pay allowances for certain categories of policing, but generally it's all the same for everybody.  So those things need to be looked at a little bit more I would say.  And that's part of I think the process of transformation. There are initiatives in place to address much of what I have raised but the size and complexity of the organization means that it can take a long time before these things are properly implemented if at all.  We started from --

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SCHER:	OK, this is the second part of the interview with Gareth Newham on the 22nd of January.  So I was wondering if we could talk for a moment about any anticorruption initiatives.  We've touched on a lot of accountability things.  But any specific initiatives that you're working on at the moment or that you've worked on quite recently to control corruption or on the beat officers collecting private tolls, those sorts of things.

NEWHAM:	Well, my first long term research project around this took place in the Hillbrow Police Station, which as I mentioned is one of the biggest police stations in South Africa and had one of the highest crime rates.  It still has one of the highest crime rates.  It's inner city police station serving quite a few hundred thousand people, a very diverse population, a lot of migrants from other parts of the country and immigrants from other countries living there.  And was actually one of those stations which in the past was called a "straf stasie" in Afrikaans, which in English means "punishment station".  So if people were misbehaving or fell out of favor in other areas they would be sent to that station, because it was seen as a very difficult place to work.  But for those who actually worked there, you find that none of the police officers there would ever want to leave because it's an exciting dynamic place, but also because it has many opportunities for corruption.  In 2000 a new police commissioner was appointed there who had success at managing stations in various townships including Soweto and he was appointed there to turn the station around.  There was a lot of inner city decay there, crime rate was rocketing, it had the highest murder rate in the country, and at the time there was a whole move to regenerate the inner city and Hillbrow was in the heart of it.  So he contacted the Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation and he wanted to - well he had restructured his police management team and he wanted to introduce his new management team to the community of Hillbrow, through a workshop with community representatives, about 60 to 70 representatives of organized groupings such as different faith-based organizations, women's groups, youth groups, NGOs, residents associations, that kind of thing.  Anyway I ended up helping design and run that workshop which also allowed community representatives to express their needs and concerns about policing in the inner-city.  At that time I was also coincidentally writing a proposal around conducting research on the management of police corruption at a police station because I had seen this as an area that wasn't receiving much attention.  In '99 the police head announced they were going to develop a police integrity strategy.  And I had been looking at work of the SAPS National Anti-Corruption unit, which the national police commissioner was in the process of closing down for what were not convincing reasons.  The numbers of cases that they were investigating at that time stood about 6000 a year with 1,000 officers charged for corruption.  And that suddenly dropped to about 500.  There was no attempt to investigate corruption during apartheid and the establishment of this unit in 1996 was seen as an important contribution to transforming the SAPS.  Of course by now this unit was becoming quite a threat to a lot of police officers.  It had a very bad reputation in the police, because it was going into police stations, handcuffing police officers and dragging them off into the back of police vans and prosecuting them.  And that's immediately going to cause a lot of friction.  So I wanted to better understand what needed to be done to address corruption at police station level. I wanted to better understand what it was about South African police culture and the management approach of the police that either allows it to happen or can be used to minimize it. I was also keen on understanding if there were ways of minimizing corruption in addition to having the threat of investigating and charging people, because reality is you're never going to tackle most police corruption this way. Both the corruptee and the corruptor are involved in a crime, and a lot of the tip offs that came to the anti-corruption units were from people who fallen out with each other after engaging in corruption.  So for example, one of the parties thinks they've been shortchanged in a deal involving bribery, and then they might go and report the police officer. Most of these tip offs are anonymous and so the investigation does not go far. And even where the case goes to court the evidence is under question because of how it was obtained possibly from a tainted witness, there's no other witnesses and so forth.  So the conviction rates for corruption, even with the specialized units, are quite low.  So I was quite interested in that, and I started looking at the issue of police integrity.  And about the whole notion of management accountability, culture of the police.  There's been a lot of work around this as well internationally, ideas about how to use police culture in a positive way rather than only to see it in a negative light.  If these police officers really believe in what they're doing and they have a pride in their uniform and understand the important role they play in society, why they have the powers they have, why they're subjected to more accountability than maybe other structures, it can be a positive thing where they don't accept corruption within their own ranks, and that ideally your anticorruption policy should be one which, to quote a saying I came across promotes the idea that "the biggest enemy to a corrupt cop should be an honest cop." Of course as a corrupt officer you are not going to be concerned about some outside person who's going to report you, but you will think twice before engaging in corruption because your own colleagues are not going to tolerate this kind of thing. So I was interested in how this type of police culture could be established.  CSVR agreed to the research and I pitched the idea to do this research to the Hillbrow station commissioner and he was very enthusiastic because he was receiving numerous complaints of corruption almost on a daily basis.  I mean Hillbrow, across all spheres of the station, the detectives, the cells, crime prevention units, all kinds of things were happening.  And so with generous funding from the Irish Government I embarked on a three- or four-year program with him to develop strategies with the police, with police managers, on everything from teambuilding courses to communication to running workshops on the importance of what supervision means, what role modeling means in policing, etc.  We drafted and distributed booklets on police integrity, and what management for police integrity meant in simple language based on interviews with police managers that we had identified as good.  As I mentioned earlier I like to use a very participatory methodology called participatory action research.  So I got the police involved in the design of the program so that they would clearly understand the purpose of the project and its objectives and I could engage with their concerns.  All the initiatives and materials we developed such as the booklets and the design and materials for the workshops, was based on real and personal police experiences.  So it wasn't theoretical, it wasn't abstract or academic. It dealt with real issues and would encourage police members to think about, when this happens why is it bad, what do you do, why does it happen.  Based on a three pronged anti-corruption model I developed from international literature, I engaged with the police in developing a practical anticorruption strategy for the police station.  In 2003 that police commissioner was promoted to the area commissioner for Johannesburg, and he was now in control of 21 police stations, and so we replicated that project for 21 police stations in Johannesburg.  Based on that work I was then invited by the national strategic management component of the SAPS to run workshops to assist in developing a SAPS National Strategy for the Prevention of Corruption and Fraud. They had started with a national integrity service strategy a few years before this which hadn't gone anywhere for two years, this was about 2004, and I ran a couple three day workshops for police managers from around the country over two successive years to help develop this strategy. It has now been adopted and should be implemented this year.  It contains both reactive and proactive approaches to tackling police corruption within four key pillars including prevention, detection, investigation and restoration. For example a proactive measure is providing training that assists police officers to be aware of the threat of corruption and how to respond to it.  There's a code of conduct in place, but reading, making people memorize this is one thing, but showing undercover video footage of police involved in drug deals or taking a bribe and the consequences that they face when caught is another thing.  Some of my research focused on listening to stories of police officers who were convicted for corruption and focusing on how they've become corrupt and what could have changed their behavior at the time.  So the new strategy is informed by some of this research. That was in 2005 and was the last time I really did any focused work on police corruption until the project I mentioned earlier which I am about to embark on - developing a centralized data base on complaints, disciplinary and criminal action taken against the police.  In the Gauteng Safety strategy we talk about corruption and we want to monitor the implementation of that strategy in Gauteng very closely.  So we would like the police to report to the minister regularly, at least quarterly actually, on their objectives and how they're implementing the prevention of corruption strategy, how many resources they put into it, what's happening with the training, what's happening with the various structures and systems they need to put in place.  So initially just monitoring the implementation of that strategy and seeing if it's working or not.  But at the moment there still is no real -- there's no implementation of the anticorruption strategy. If you speak to most police officers at station level they won't know what the strategy is.  As I said there was -- until the closure of the anticorruption unit in 2001, most police station commanders would just hand their cases over to this unit, if they got complaints or information, evidence of police corruption, they would hand it over to that unit.  It was a highly specialized unit with its own databases, own secured location and space and training.  But then in 2000 the national commissioner decided to close all the specialized police units, they closed the anticorruption unit as well.  In my opinion this decision was a mistake and did not appear to be thought through carefully enough. I am not sure if there was a proper process to think through which types of crime require specialized units and which do not. They saw they had too many specialized units, 503 units in fact, and saw general problems with so many specialized units such as duplication of investigation and they needed to bolster general detective capacity at station level,  they closed them all down.  The only specialized units to remain at the time were the Commercial branch which investigated fraud and commercial crimes, and the Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Assault units or FCS units. Seemingly, they kept a family and sexual offenses unit largely because there's a public outcry against that and also because it makes sense to have people who specialize in working with children who are victims of sexual abuse and rape victims.  A key problem is that don't seem to pilot these things before whole scale implementation.  So they'll adopt a strategy and then they'll just expect all 160,000 police officers across the entire country to fall in line. There's never been an approach in the police to first pilot some of these new policies or pilot versions of the policies in different places and assess the impact to determine whether or not it achieves the intended results.  And I would always argue best to do it in low crime areas, especially if it's not directly related to crime fighting, so that if it results in inefficiencies, even in the short-term, these can be clearly identified and steps taken to minimize them when rolling out in high crime areas.  

SCHER:	Just wanted to pick up on something you said, which was a good model for collecting corruption complaints and other types of things.  One of the specialized units that was shut down.  Could you just talk a little bit more about that and why it was a good model?

NEWHAM:	Well it was a good model because it was --

SCHER:	Sorry, what was this unit called?

NEWHAM:	It was called the South African Police Service National Anti-Corruption Unit or ACU for short.  It was established in 1996 when it became very clear that there was a problem of senior police officers, or various police officers, being involved in various crimes ranging from organized crime syndicates such as those involved in hijackings and taxi violence, all the way through to drug deals and that kind of thing.  And that's something that was -- the corruption in Hillbrow in the '80s and '90s was quite phenomenal.  I interviewed police officers who were there at the time, and I interviewed police officers who'd been convicted for corruption.  I interviewed one of the first police officers ever to be formally prosecuted and convicted for police corruption.  These interviews assisted me in getting a sense of what types of police corruption had been occurring.  Because as a researcher you're not really going to see that first had, and if you are going to see that as a researcher, it raises a whole lot of ethical dilemmas. What do you do if you witness police committing major criminal acts?  It could be an interesting ethnographic study but quite a dangerous one I'd imagine.  So as much time as I hung out with police, and I would pick up signs of or hints of things, I never witnessed any corruption first hand - not that I was expecting to.  The purpose of my research was not to identify corrupt officers.  I already knew from a range of other sources, the ACU, and studies with vulnerable groups such as with foreign nationals who were in the country illegally, or sex workers in the inner-city, that corruption was a significant problem.  There were also a number of television documentaries that filmed corrupt officers taking or demanding bribes.  I was also given many examples in my interviews with police officials and people who had claimed that they had been approached for bribes from police officials.  Of course this type information is always hearsay and you have to treat that kind of information with some level of caution because even within a single police station there are definite agendas and people who don't like each other for whatever reason and who may try and discredit each other.  So when I was doing a lot nonparticipant observation by going out with different police units in the field, going out on patrols and spending many hours with them over a period of years, I increasingly become part of the furniture.  Although you're always an outsider you do get a lot of insights and you do build up trust based relationships with people.  And became very clear that in the late '90s, early 2000, that the anticorruption unit was having an effect.  A  number of officers told me that they had seen a change or that they had stopped taking chances as they might put it,  because they had seen other police officers being arrested and charged for corruption by the ACU.  These were not necessarily the officers involved in major organized crime syndicates, but people who were engaging in what is sometimes referred to as petty corruption, basically charging for free services such as signing an affidavit or allowing a person to visit a person in the police cells, or they would arrest an undocumented foreign national, and then take money to release them, or arrest somebody for a petty crime and then take money not to charge them. Another example of a practice occurring among some detectives was that if a docket was sent to the prosecutorial authority and they decided not to prosecute because there may not be enough evidence to support a conviction, the detective would go back to the suspect and say you're in big trouble, but for a certain fee I can make this go away, even though the prosecuting authority had already declined to prosecute. Of course the suspect wouldn't necessarily know and would generally be too happy to pay the detective to escape a trial. 

END OF AUDIO FILE 2

SCHER:	This is part three of the interview with Gareth Newham.  We were talking about the South African anticorruption unit.

NEWHAM:	So I had officers admit to me that they'd been involved in this kind of thing and had stopped because they had seen colleagues of theirs being arrested and charged and prosecuted.  And it was obviously having an impact.  The ACU was definitely presenting a disincentive to do this kind of thing.  Whereas beforehand there was a sense among police officers  that nothing's going to happen to you if you did do that.  I did various surveys to get a sense of that.  I implemented a survey developed by Professor Carl Klockars, the late Professor Carl Klockars, who did a lot of research around this stuff in the United States. In fact he included an article I wrote on my findings after running his survey in the Hillbrow police stations in his last book "The Contours of Police Integrity." Anyway, he developed an integrity survey which presented police officials with various vignettes, describing a series of situations where a police officer with five years' experience and who had never had a disciplinary problem before, engaged in some level of unethical or corrupt behavior.  And then on a Likert scale ask what the individual police officer to rate how serious they thought the behavior was, how serious they thought their colleagues would think the behavior was, whether the behavior was against police regulations, whether they would report such behavior, whether they thought their colleagues would report,and if it was reported what would be the disciplinary outcome, if anything. The vignettes range from a police officer accepting an informal gift to a police officer stealing stuff from crime scenes or accepting a bribe not to make an arrest. The purpose of the survey is to gauge the organizational culture and dynamics that support or work against police corruption. It provides you with a good sense of where some of the challenges may lie. In my findings of Hillbrow at the time, there was general agreement that the most serious case was one where a police official accepted a bribe not to arrest a person who was driving under the influence. However, less than 20% of the police officers, 18% in fact, thought that the person would be fired. An astonishing 82% or the respondents thought that an officer who was found guilty of taking a bribe would not be dismissed from the police service.  6% thought that nothing would happen to this officer even if subjected to a disciplinary process.  The single biggest choice that the police officers at Hillbrow at that time, the disciplinary action they thought would happen to a corrupt officer would be a verbal warning.  So they thought that if you were caught taking a bribe not to arrest somebody the worst you could -- one third of officers thought the worst thing that would happen to you would be that you would get a verbal warning.  So the disincentives for doing a lot of this stuff, generally weren't there.  Almost two thirds of the respondents did not think that their colleagues would report it.  So just to give you a sense of dynamics around that stuff.  And now for the first time, the anticorruption unit was an investigative structure staffed by police officers who knew the 'tricks of the trade' so to speak, who were actively arresting police officers involved in corruption. Although ACU had a level of respect, it wasn't necessarily liked by a lot of police officers because many thought that it was wrong to be targeting police officials for what was often thought of as petty corruption, a perk of the job, some officers were arrested for taking R10 to sign an affidavit, while it was argued that they should have been targeting serious criminals. As far as I could tell the unit was not targeting police officials for petty corruption, they were targeting officers who were engaging in corruption of any type. It was just that most of the corruption that came to light was petty. Certainly a lot of officers were talking about the unit.  And it came up in a lot of my formal interviews and informal discussions with police officers. I wouldn't necessarily raise the issue of the anticorruption unit, I would just be talking to police officers on their views on corruption , and it would come up a lot.  So when they closed the ACU down I knew that there was a problem at a national level in understanding and tackling police corruption in the organization. There was a bit if an outcry, and I wrote a newspaper opinion piece or two and an article for the SA Crime Quarterly journal explaining why I thought this was a problematic decision, but it went ahead anyway.  In one particular bland official statement from national police Head Quarters, it was stated that all police officers have a duty to investigate corruption, not just one specialized unit.  Ideally Yeah, but one thing that was very clear from my many interviews with police officers is that they don't want to investigate their colleagues.  It is difficult and sometimes dangerous work.  The previous internal investigation units that were at stations until they were closed down had a 1% success rate when it came to convictions.  So many police officers do not pursue cases against their colleagues vigorously as they fear opprobrium and isolation from their peers. In addition, much of the serious or grand corruption requires specialist covert investigative methods that ordinary detectives are not trained or equipped to conduct.  It is for these types of reasons that you have to have dedicated specialized officers who are specially trained, who have the resources and the support from the national and the senior leadership, to go after anybody in the police who might be involved in corruption.

SCHER:	When you said it was an independent structure, so you said own officers, own HR system, own --

NEWHAM:	Yeah it was subject to the rules of police agency, but it operated from secured premises, had its own internal data and communications system, its own budget, its own resources and training, its own informers and was given a lot of leeway to pursue cases against police officials. And that's partly why there was some level of resentment for it, because they were seen as having special treatment.  But then there's cost to those officers working in the unit. They weren't invited to police functions, they weren't well liked in the organization and were generally isolated from the broader police camaraderie that other police officials enjoy. And even though they made a lot of arrests, prosecuting corruption is very difficult and so a lot of officers who were charged and suspended during a prosecution would not have been convicted and would have continued to remain in the organization.  They would have actively worked to undermine the ACU just for the embarrassment of being caught or being investigated.  So you've got to actually really create a separate career pathing.  And some agencies internationally, I think it's Hong Kong, I'll have to check on where it is, but you can't become a commissioned officer unless you've spent some time working in the internal investigation or disciplinary structures. You have to demonstrate- as I was saying earlier at the beginning of the interview- demonstrate your willingness and ability to take action against police officers who are acting contrary to the law, contrary to the rules of conduct of the organization.  So you don't have what happens in many police agencies, corrupt police officials operate with impunity, encourage other police officers to become part of their activities creating corrupt groups within the police agency, who may make lots of arrests, sometimes through planting evidence, get rewarded, get promoted, are seen as an asset because they appear to be effective but ultimately result in very highly ranked and powerful senior officers working with organized crime syndicates. Crime syndicates operating multi-million dollar operations don't want to rely on ordinary police officials to assist them. They will be willing to spend a lot of money on powerful individuals with plenty of influence in the police organization. And some of the people that I've spoken to were actively corrupted by the commanders.  They would start as a new constable and the first year the shift commander just handed them money, saying here's 200 Rand, go and spend this on a weekend, and then why is this, what's it for? They would be told, "Just enjoy it its for doing a good job".  And only later they are they asked to do something against the regulations or turn a blind eye to something. And if they show any kind of unwillingness to comply they will come under huge pressure. They will be asked, "Where do you think this money is coming from?"  They also know that if they report it will be their word against their commanders and their entire unit will turn against them.  In addition, they have already compromised themselves for accepting money from their commander who will then say "nothing in life is free."  If they did still not want to play ball, suddenly find themselves completely ostracized, have complaints laid against them for poor work performance and redeployed to undesirable locations perhaps far from their homes. If they continue to speak out against it, they will soon find themselves on the receiving end of threats to themselves and their families. So it gets very hair-raising.  It's like a cancer, you're either actively fighting it in the police organization or it's growing.  And in South Africa it is not being fought hard enough. It was fought effectively until 2001, and then the anticorruption unit was closed down and there was no structure to replace that and the policies haven't been implemented.  People are still getting arrested for corruption, there are still operations, police organized crime units still do arrest police members  -- there's still around a couple hundred cops a year that actually get arrested, prosecuted.  But given the size of the organization and the scale of the problem I don't think it's enough to effectively reduce the problem.  There's always a lot of sensitivity I think in a lot of countries, certainly in developing countries, around calling something an anticorruption unit, because it's almost like admitting that you have a corruption problem.  This is why I referred to my research as relating to police integrity, to emphasize the positive outcome that the research was trying to encourage. I think most police agencies around the world don't like to admit that they have a corruption problem or don't like to deal with it openly and decisively.  Even when it is openly acknowledged it is difficult to sustain. The experience of the NYPD is instructive.  New York has had six commissions of inquiry into police corruption since the 1920s, latest one being the 1994, Mollen Commission.  They appear to have made great progress since then, but the earlier commissions did not successfully result in sustained success against the problem. Even though we certainly have a challenge with corruption, I don't think the corruption in South African police service is as bad as the stuff I've read about happening in New York or in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s.

SCHER:	One thing I wanted to ask your opinion on.  Some people who I've spoken with have suggested that raise the salaries.  That you can't come down heavily on corruption until you're paying people a decent living wage.  Is that something that you would say is applicable here?  Or what are your thoughts on that issue?  Because I know it's quite contentious.

NEWHAM:	It is a contentious issue and it's often raised by police themselves.  But the reality is that our police officials get paid well compared with many other countries and certainly the salaries of our senior police officers are very good.  If you're superintendent or above, you make a good living in the SAPS.  There's not a massive disparity between the average private sector salaries and what senior police officials are earning at those levels.  Non-commissioned police officers receive a higher rate of pay than teachers and nurses, other civil servants who are within the same skills band.  And there's been a lot of work on improving the salaries for the police.  The key problem I think is that many new recruits come from poor families and a job in the SAPS is seen as a ticket to a better quality of life.  Suddenly constables are able to easily access credit because they have a regular pay check with the government. They very quickly buy houses, vehicles, and furniture which they cannot actually afford.  This often leads to new police officials getting into serious debt and not being able to manage.  So a fair amount of corruption could be linked to poor financial management rather than low salaries. So a general policy of raising salaries in South Africa would not change the issue of corruption. There are very senior police officers involved in corruption.  Many low ranking police officers live within their means without becoming corrupt. The key issue is financial and debt management of police officers which needs to be looked at as part of a police integrity strategy.    Maybe in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo where they may not pay the police officers regularly, you'll have problems with corruption for that reason.  Or where the salaries are extremely low and cannot keep up with inflation such as in Zimbabwe, then increasing salaries may be a useful component of an anti-corruption strategy, but never on its own. But importantly, simply raising salaries will not change the levels of corruption in a police organization. There also has to be additional and meaningful disincentives as some will just carry on being corrupt if they don't think that there will ever be a negative consequence. It's also very much an ethical issue.  Police are all -- police officers when they're trained, when they join the organization, know exactly why they're there and what the conditions of service are.  And they are all fully aware of what corruption is.  I didn't ever find a situation where -and I did training with police officers around the country for a couple years. I trained around 600 police officers from different ranks across the country on performance management, maladministration and corruption, and no one didn't know what corruption was.  They might not know the legal definitions or they might have a very broad definition, they'll think that somebody who's not working properly is being corrupt or something.  But they certainly understand that it's wrong, it's not acceptable, and that it undermines policing.  And no one in the police advertises their corruption.  And what is interesting is how many people know, have ideas of who's corrupt, but they just don't want to go into it, so they don't.  A lot of middle managers I'd ask, direct supervisors of shifts, when I was working with them I'd say would you have an idea who's corrupt, and they'd say Yeah we know, we know. And I would ask, so why don't you take action, they would typically say, we don't have evidence.  We just -- we put a new guy at a particular unit, and he comes to us a month later and says I don't want to work with this unit anymore; I don't want to be arrested by the anticorruption unit or I am not comfortable working with this unit.  That's not evidence of corruption, that's just a sign that there might be things going on there.  And turning a blind eye is very common in the police.  Unless you're deliberately instructed to investigate a fellow police officer and you are a diligent police officer, you're not going to go out of your way to find out what your colleague is up to.  I've been in police patrol vehicles, we would stop outside a flat in inner-city, an officer would run upstairs and come down again ten minutes later.  This would happen a few times.  When I asked what was going on because we were on street patrol, I was not with detectives looking for people, no one would know why he did that and seemed uncomfortable with the question but clearly weren't going to ask this officer.  Also, it is important to recognize that just because a police officer or a unit engages in corruption from time to time, it does not mean that they are also not arresting criminals and providing assistance to people.  Sometimes the leadership of a police agency may think that it is just not worth the upheaval that it may cause to act decisively against corruption in the organization. 

SCHER:	Some other things I've heard is that I've heard some people speak quite passionately about not tackling the guy who's -- or tackling the guy who's getting the free lunch, and not going for the guys who are like involved with the serious organized crime, that it doesn't make sense to hit the guys who are on the beat and maybe taking 50 rand, 100 rand to not write up a speeding ticket, when there's high level officers involved in much more serious levels of crime.  Is that something that -- what are your thoughts on that?

NEWHAM:	Well it's not an either or.  You've got to do both.  Senior officers who work with crime syndicates start somewhere and it is usually with less serious corruption. If they'd been fired and prosecuted for petty corruption there would be fewer senior officers involved.  But your investigation structures and methods differ according to the type of police corruption you are tackling. Most detectives could quite easily do what is needed to arrest cops for taking petty bribes or extortion, especially where a victim complains. Or investigate allegations of gifts for police favors. But it really is a whole different ballgame when you're looking at senior or very experienced police officers working with high level organized crime syndicates.  The senior police officers who have a lot of authority -- because remember big syndicates, especially those involved in organized crime, especially involving millions of Rands such as the syndicates involved in large scale drugs smuggling and distribution or the processing and movement of hijacked vehicles or goods stolen from factories or trucks, and so forth, these syndicates won't spend much money on low ranking or incompetent police officers -- they want somebody who has authority to access police information and make decisions, someone who will be able to obtain information on all the places where special operations will be held, places targeted for a raid, where the roadblocks are going to be, they want somebody that, if one of their guys gets arrested, can see the docket, access the docket, can tell them what's going on with the investigation what evidence in outstanding, someone who can give them access to that person and even intervene in the investigation.  They want somebody who has the access to the various information systems the police have, that can track what's happening in various situations.  And not everybody has that kind of access.  So syndicates will be looking to corrupt commissioned officers, people of captain rank or higher.  And they're willing to pay for that.  They'll pay a lot of money to get those people.  And they will be patient.  They may spend time building relationships and friendships long before any corrupt activity happens. They may even start by trying to corrupt or build relationships with promising young and inexperienced police officials knowing that in a few years this person will be in a more powerful position. 

END OF AUDIO FILE 3

SCHER:	OK, this is part four of the interview with Gareth Newham on the 22nd of January, 2008.  Gareth, I realize we're running to the end of our time, and really want to thank you for taking so much time out of your work morning to talk with me today.  You've spoken about quite a few different internal management issues and accountability issues, and I was wondering if there were -- in South Africa we have this situation where you're reforming an existing structure.  In other contexts you're actually building a new structure.  If you were in this position in Country X where you had to build, design a new internal management system and a new accountability structure -- I know this is quite a big question, but if you were going to write a handbook for somebody, what would the chapter titles be and what would the sequencing of the reforms needed be?  Is that too big?

NEWHAM:	So building a new management or building a new organization.

SCHER:	Yeah, what would you say were the key like things that --

END OF AUDIO FILE 4

SCHER:	This is part five of the interview with Gareth Newham, just following on from my earlier question.

NEWHAM:	My opinion is that the single most important element will be who is appointed as the leadership of the organization.  The values and the competencies of the Chief of police and his or her management team are the most important factors in any police agency.  They will determine what kind of police organization will emerge.  Then it is about defining the vision and the mission of the police agency. What kind of police agency do you want to build and what do you want the agency to be able to do and how. If you're building a new police organization you're probably also building a new state, a new democracy, something like that.  So you would really want to first have a vision about what this organization is going to be like, what kind of people do you want in it, what's it going to do and what is its role going to be in society?  If there is a new constitution then that is document from which to define the vision and the mission of the organization.  And be explicit. If Human Rights are important and the government seriously wants to assist and protect all citizens with an emphasis on the most vulnerable in society, this must be made completely explicit in the vision and mission of the police agency.  From there the recruitment, training, structure and regulations of organization must clearly support the vision and the mission.  The vast majority of most police officers' time is not fighting crime, it's solving a whole range of problems that people have that they don't know who to turn to and they therefore call the police.  So you would need to recognize that as well.  And it needs to be quite broadly structured, so it needs to be a general service delivery thing, it needs to be a structure that people want to phone the police because they know they will get help, they see the -- they respect the police as people who are trained, have integrity.  So then that's about once you've got an idea of what that organization is going to do, ranging from -- Yeah all police will have highly trained taskforce structures, paramilitary type units to tackle specific types of organized violence and crime,  but a majority of officers will be the average cop on the beat.  So clearly define the range of services that the police will offer and at what level.  Be particularly clear about the minimum range of services offered at a police station and the minimum competencies of each post to be filled at this level. Of course crime intelligence capacity it critical. Build that up as soon as possible so that you can direct your police resources effectively.  Also pay attention to technology and data management systems. Once you clarify that, then it's about your recruitment.  What kind of people?  What level of experience or education?  Who do you want them to be?  What kind of skills competencies should they have?  What kind of personality should they have?  So that's your recruitment.  And then what kind of training do you want to offer them?  And then very clearly your promotions and your career planning systems are critically important.  Because a lot of dissatisfaction and corruption can happen if these things are not in place. When South Africa changed the apartheid era promotion system, it caused problems.  You used to get promoted every four years automatically, until the level of Inspector, the highest rank for a non-commissioned officer, after which the competition for commissioned officer posts began.  So you had this massive pool of people who were say in their early 30s, which would be in the early or middle part of their careers, and then there's no opportunity to increase your rank and therefore salary no matter what you do. Because many of them did not complete high school and had no tertiary education, they couldn't even apply for a higher position in the police.  They're getting a guaranteed salary and a pension, so they don't want to leave the job, we are a country with high unemployment, but they're not going to improve their standard of living or job satisfaction. There are few opportunities for this. As a result many will start looking at ways in which to supplement their income either through moonlighting as private security which is not allowed in South Africa or start using their police powers to increase their personal wealth.   So you've got to be able to look at that kind of thing, what career options do you provide?  And then Yeah just I suppose those are the key things. And then most crucially its about establishing fair and effective systems for accountability. You must assume there's going to be problems with performance and corruption.  Assume there's going to be problems with misconduct.  So make sure there are systems that are able to deal with that.  But don't only focus on negative accountability - that is firing or demoting people who are not performing or who are transgressing regulations.  Also have systems to encourage morale, and build a professional esprit de corps. Build confident managers who have leeway to make decisions and solve problems creatively as long as its within the law.  Reward those that go the extra mile at all levels of the organization.  So try and get that balance.  It's not just about we'll punish you for breaking rules.  It's about why is it good to do certain things, why is it good to go the extra mile, why is it good to get extra training, why is it good to get educated or read beyond your position.  And also very important, how do you make policy?  Do you just sit in a group with a small number of people and agree on it and then just implement it?  Do you call in external stakeholders?  Consult meaningfully with those within the organization who'll be affected by it?  Design a few pilot projects of various alternatives?  And then assess the pilots and release the results and clear reasons for decisions?  How do you make sure that your police officers buy into the organization?  Understand and internalize the values?  Ensure that they feel they have a place and a voice there?  So and that's not just about having unions with whom you bargain, and can play an important role, but it's about making sure that the general leadership are trusted, respected and admired because they clearly and consistently articulate a vision that all can understand and buy into. Police organizations very typically have a top-down management approach where everybody waits to be given instructions from above and once issued there is no chance for any questions or discussion.  But without engagement there will be problems with implementation, because if people don't understand it or can't ask questions then they're not going to be able to implement it, or they might resist it actively.  So those are the kinds of things that I think you really want to focus on quite a lot.  And build a sense of pride.  I think an automatic reality of all police agencies is the organizational culture.  So spend a lot of time investing into building pride in that culture.  That people who have been recruited into the police are exceptional people, and they are exceptional because they have better training, they have authority and they are held to a higher standard than other public servants or private employees generally.  They have a very important role to play in society.  If they have respect for themselves and recognize their own self-importance -- not as in an arrogant way, but that they have an important role to assist and help the people of their country, because they come from those communities -- then the people from those communities will respect and support them too.  So it's probably about getting that vision for the police right and then looking at the organizational management systems that support that.  And looking internationally at what the principles are, what has been tried, becoming very aware or possible challenges and unintended consequences of various policies and strategies.  Typically I think in a lot of -- certainly in South Africa and other countries, there is no shortage of experience.  But there's no single model or blue print you can just transplant to create a new effective police organization.  And there are a lot of people who make a living as consultants who assist police across the world.  These people can play a role but it is also important to recognize that you've got to test these things to see what works in your society or country, as opposed to expecting a certain approach or system to work in all circumstances.  And I think maybe getting down to core principles, because at the end of the day I think there are core principles that work with policing, around values, organizational values, what should they be.  And it's easy to say this, but the reality is that when people are facing crime decisions are often taken based on fear and the need for quick results.  You can have quick results in pushing crime out of a specific neighborhood, but not if you want sustainable reductions at the level of a city or larger.  And when states have police, they like to see them as a source of authority and force, and they like to see them as -- and they can easily become private armies of the ruling elite.  And if you're coming from countries with conflict, there's not even an -- there's never been an experience of consensus and common nationhood.  You're trying to build something where there is no experience, or there's no institutional memory.  And when there is weak leadership or conflicting messages, people quickly interpret or fall back on what they know which may be completely at odds with the new vision.  So I think it's an incredibly difficult job.  But I suppose maybe that's the way to understand the idea.  And certainly new countries building new police services that are democratic and have got a general political consensus of the way forward have a huge opportunity to do that.  I think South Africa - we certainly have been a country that has had that opportunity and a lot has been achieved.  And I think it is easy when caught up in it, when you have a passion to improve things so the challenges are magnified, to underestimate how much has actually been achieved.  But I really think we could still do a lot more.  There's a lot more we could do with the potential we have. I don't know how practical that is but I hope it has been helpful. 

SCHER:	That's great, that's great.  And I think that's an excellent note to finish on and I'd like to thank you again for your time.

END OF INTERVIEW



Innovations for Successful Societies                                                                 Series: Policing              
Oral History Program                                                                               Interview number: C1



Innovations for Successful Societies				Series: 	Policing
Oral History Program						Interview number:  C-1



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Use of this transcript is governed by ISS Terms of Use, available at www.princeton.edu/successfulsocieties