ABSTRACT
In the mid-1990s, two high-profile corporate-sponsored business campaigns
against crime emerged in South Africa – The Nedcor Project on Crime, Violence
and Investment, and Business Against Crime (BAC). Through such campaigns,
the private sector became consciously and collectively involved in restructuring
state crime control practices and policies. This was achieved primarily by offering
assistance to government for the transformation of the SAPS (South African Police
Service) into a ‘better trained and equipped police force’ (Nedcor August 1995,
4). Business supported an enhanced police capacity for rapid response through its
donation of 100 BMWs toward a special anti-hijacking highway patrol unit that had
as one of its focal concerns sophisticated crime syndicates that targeted high-end
or luxury vehicles. Industry provided government with technical expertise, which
facilitated access to the latest technological advances, such as CCTV and cellphone
networks, that were used for surveillance and crime detection within key commercial
districts, but also served the purpose of upgrading police services in underprivileged
communities. The private sector promoted discourses of numeracy and the extension
of market disciplines to criminal justice agencies: the introduction of performance
indicators and business plans at (police) station level, which established a degree
of consonance between the broad programmatic objectives of accountability,
transparency and efficiency, and more concrete strategies for the allocation of scarce
operational resources; the development of a ‘reliable’ crime information system to
chart the specific characteristics of crime as an object to be governed – its spatial
coordinates, trends, costs. At the same time, these business-sponsored anti-crime
initiatives revealed that industry also assumed some degree of responsibility for the
routine management of its own security risks and needs especially in relation to
economic crime.
