SA should heed Antony Altbeker’s advice to curb crime

CRIME and violence has become sort of a national pastime in South Africa – or at least it feels that way, with everyone talking about the latest in security gates and Tasers, or someone they know having become a recent victim.

Worse, it doesn’t appear as if the South African government has any idea what to do about it (other than turning the police into a trigger-happy, quasi-military force).

But then there’s Antony Altbeker, who spent a decade working as a criminologist. He offered a number of solutions to the crime epidemic in his 2007 book, A Country at War with Itself: South Africa’s Crisis of Crime.

A person in South Africa is 20 times more likely to be murdered than someone in western Europe, and 80 times more likely than someone in Japan.

The South African government is in denial about this country’s scourge of crime and violence, the highest in the world. South Africans are robbed, raped, murdered and suffer high levels of criminal violence daily.

No wonder then that, as anyone who has visited South Africa will know, violent crime is now a national obsession.

Houses are surrounded by barbed wire and electric fences and signs everywhere warn potential criminals that they will be met with an “armed response” if they try anything.

Given such a state of affairs, the book and polemic by Antony Altbeker, who spent more than 10 years as a criminologist doing such things as shadowing detectives, is particularly relevant.

Altbeker opens by recounting his own terrifying experience of crime: he got held up by armed thugs in a fast food restaurant and only survived because the gun belonging to one of the criminals jammed.

A main argument presented in his book – A Country at War with Itself: South Africa’s Crisis of Crime (Jonathan Ball Publishers) – is that violent crime has become common because of a culture of violence that feeds on itself.

If so many other people are robbing and murdering – so the argument goes – then it becomes easier for others to cross the mental divide from being a law-abiding individual to a criminal and do the same.

Altbeker feels that this culture of violence partly stems from the end of the hated apartheid system in 1994, which he says set many young men adrift in a brave new world that lacked the societal checks to teach them the difference between right and wrong.

Altbeker insists that, to reduce the tide of violent crime, the authorities should stop focusing their efforts on community policing or the idea that by being visible officers they can prevent crime.

Instead, he says, the priority should be on tracking down criminals and jailing them for long periods.

While the prison populations of the UK and the US have risen dramatically in recent decades, Altbeker says the increase in the number of people behind bars in South Africa has not been fast enough compared with the explosion in crime rates in the country.

The author advocates the doubling of the prison population and, to help achieve this, he believes that detective operations be given higher priority.

Nonetheless, this is a thoughtful book that provides valuable possible solutions to the present state of affairs in South Africa.

Let’s hope our government and leadership take heed.

Yours in the struggle for a crime-free society. Samaoen Osman Crawford