The police should be the major force behind the fight against crime. Right?
Wrong. So said United Nations delegates in Durban Wednesday, during a national workshop on how local municipalities could help develop and maintain safe neighbourhoods.
Claude Vezina of the International Centre for the Prevention of Crime and Laura Petrella, representing the UN, presented their experience on how safer communities were developed and maintained in Africa, North America, Europe and Australia.
They said the problem of crime was too large to be handled by the police alone. International experience, they said, had shown that the best way to prevent crime was through involvement of communities in the gathering of crime intelligence, and by improving people's living conditions, so that their environment would be less conducive to criminal activity.
In their presentation document, Vezina and Petrella stated that social crime, such as substance abuse, child molestation and women abuse, was a key target of the "safer cities and communities development" campaign.
Poverty alleviation programmes should be funded.
It was the task of local authorities to develop links with communities, which themselves often had ideas on how crime should be defeated.
Security should be sustainable and the economy had to be developed so that poverty, the major driving force of crime, would be curtailed.
The campaign had to be embraced by all departments within a municipality. In the case of eThekwini, it should not be left only to the Metro Police.
An effort to rehabilitate street children and ex-convicts had to be made and a way to protect women and the elderly had to be developed.
Areas targeted should include public and recreation areas in rural and urban districts.
A number of Canadian and some African states had already set up neighbourhood watch groups. The delegates warned that any action undertaken in this regard had to be within the perimeters of the law.