In this commentary, Barbara Holtmann draws from her experience with regard to urban safety, crime and violence prevention and community development. She examines the emphasis on private security, technology and securitisation in South Africa’s approach to crime and safety. She argues that despite significant and prolonged spending in this sector, feelings of safety – and actual safety – have not substantially improved. The piece highlights the need for a more balanced approach. It should integrate technological solutions with systemic development interventions responsive to deeper underlying causes of crime, such as inequality, exclusion, and social fragmentation. It advocates for a greater consideration of ‘safety’ interventions that foster well-being, social cohesion and inclusive urban environments.
This year, the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) resumed the editorship of South African Crime Quarterly (SACQ). From 2016 to 2024, the journal was hosted by the Centre of Criminology at the University of Cape Town (UCT), which continued the SACQ tradition of publishing high-quality, policy-relevant research and analysis on crime, safety and justice in South Africa. We are grateful to our UCT colleagues for their stewardship during this period.
South Africa's 1996 Constitution introduced a dual legal system, recognising African customary law and common law traditions. This article examines how culturaly motivated crimes challenge South Africa's retributive criminal justice system, and explores restorative justice as a more appropriate alternative. Using doctrinal research methods, it analyses constitutional provisions, case law, statutory developments and indigenous practices to evaluate how cultural rights can be integrated into criminal law without undermining justice. The findings show that while South African courts have historically marginalised customary law in criminal proceedings, the Constitution provides a framework for greater incorporation of indigenous principles, particularly restorative, participatory processes that emphasise healing and accountability. The article shows that customary justice practices inherently reflect the fundamental principles of restorative justice. Accordingly, it recommends leveraging existing mechanisms such as victim-offender mediation, family group conferencing and restorative circles as culturally responsive alternatives for addressing culturaly motivated crimes in South Africa.
In the criminal justice system, effective records management is essential for justice delivery and the protection of human rights. This study investigates the security and backup measures used to safeguard electronic dockets in the South African Police Service (SAPS), focusing on selected stations in Limpopo Province. The SAPS adopted the e-docket system to address persistent problems with manual docket management, including loss, tampering, and delays. Using an exploratory survey design and quantitative approach, data was collected through a structured questionnaire presented to purposively selected police officers. The findings reveal that access to the e-docket system is primarily secured through passwords, making it vulnerable to unauthorised access. Moreover, most stations rely on manual backup systems without off-site storage, leaving electronic records exposed in the event of system failure or disaster. These weaknesses threaten the reliability and integrity of case records, with serious implications for justice administration.
Advances in technology have expanded the possibilities of state surveilance, but they have also expanded opportunities for citizens to collect data on the state.2 At present, cell phone videos, WhatsApp monitoring groups and crowdsourced mapping of real-time events are producing a raft of new data to add to older forms of civic data gathering. In the wake of global mobilisation around issues of police wrongdoing and accountability, it is important to reflect on the impact that data may have on the pursuit of justice, redress, and transformation. While not discounting the rich policing literature that exists on police accountability and change, we have opted in this article to draw on the work of Sara Ahmed, who explores complaints in the United Kingdom higher education sector.4 Her work, we argue, can help us understand why counting people does not always make them count. In other words, Ahmed shows how the effectiveness of data in securing redress and reform is often curtailed by the same patterns of oppression and stigma that facilitate police wrongdoing in the first place. In this article, we explain Ahmed's concept of a 'complaint biography' and her exposition of complaint work more broadly. We also apply her ideas to incidents of complaints against the police, and interrogate the role and importance of physical violence in this regard.
