![]() ![]() Super's research shows that in this type of situation, making communities responsible for crime prevention can be dangerous. Residents in South Africa's informal settlements experience extreme hardship marked by high rates of violent crime, scarcity of sanitation, water, safety, money, garbage collection and jobs. Thus, non-state policing continues to be the norm in South Africa. They are also perceived to be inefficient by the affluent, who unlike residents in informal settlements, have the resources to pay for private security. Since the end of apartheid, the police, after so many years of enforcing unjust laws, have struggled to regain the trust of township residents and those living in informal settlements. ![]() The apartheid government was not interested in protecting black people against crime but focused on protecting white citizens from crimes allegedly committed by black people. Super explains that South Africa has a history of state toleration of informal policing and punishment, in what used to be known as "black townships". ![]() ![]() These include disproportionately high levels of unevenly distributed violent crime, poverty, and staggeringly high levels of unemployment. The effects of colonialism and more than 40 years of apartheid government, in terms of which a political and social system of white minority rule and racial segregation was brutally enforced, have had lasting effects, felt well beyond the 1994 transition to formal democracy. South Africa is one of the world's most unequal societies. I'm interested in that blurry in-between space, and what it says about the levels of punitiveness in a democracy," says Super, whose study won a $10,000 Connaught Fund New Researcher Award last year. "In these marginalized communities, there's often an overlap between lawful forms of crime prevention, like neighbourhood watch groups, and unlawful forms of collective punishment. ![]()
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