Crime in South Africa

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The above statistics are alarming given the focus of resources to these stations. It seems, from the face of it, that the implementation of Presidential Stations is not working even though these stations were prioritised over others. The former MEC for Safety and Security from Limpopo also realised the failure in 2000 and was quoted saying that

In our assessment for the past six months, we have found that the Thohoyandou police station failed to improve in terms of combating crime, instead it is getting worse. At the end, it became the worst in the Vhembe District. They have everything, but they still fail us. If you talk about any type of crime, you get it most in Thohoyandou. We talk about economic crime like burglary, rape, assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm and other crimes; you find them at worst in Thohoyandou.

The MEC was angry with the crime situation in the Presidential station which had all the resources (cars, personnel, and computers) it needed to fight crime and was given preference to others stations. She further noted that other police stations in the area with little resources did better than the Presidential Station (Musetha: 2002). In his budget speech for his department, the MEC for Safety and Security in Mpumalanga conceded that though there were “multi-agency mechanisms structures that were established in the Presidential priority police station of KaNyamazana and the Provincial priority police stations of Vosman and Embalenhle, these structures have not born any fruit” (Pule: 2006).

Crime in South Africa possibly requires a combination both the long term social crime prevention and an effective tough short term law enforcement strategies as was an indication in the NCPS. The only way, h...

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...h a set of steps to follow with full understanding of those steps for them to implement successfully. Such a framework should mirror frameworks like the SWOT, value chain analysis, and five forces model; it would form a roadmap for implementation. This roadmap will assist line mangers implement agreed upon set of objectives without having to implement based on their own set of interpretation of the strategy but would ideally base on local environments that work. As, Mann (1980) and Hankom (1987) suggest, “policy will fail if it is not based on sound causal theory.” Given the scholarly arguments and the failures of strategy implantation, a gap in literature exists within the strategic process. That gap is the implementation frae work. The following section focuses on existing literature on implementation studies which form a basis for any new studies in the field.

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