Issued by: SA Communication Service
National Crime Prevention Strategy Update: Appearance at Portfolio Committee Hearing 2 June 1997
The National Crime Prevention Strategy is being rapidly transformed from theory into concrete results through more than two dozen crime-prevention projects launched during the past year, Secretary for Safety and Security Azhar Cachalia said today.
Addressing a hearing of all the Parliamentary portfolio committees that deal with criminal justice, Cachalia said most of the projects undertaken since the strategy was approved by Cabinet in May 1996 focused on reforming the criminal justice system.
Leaders of interdepartmental project teams gave detailed briefings to the committee on progress in implementing the different programmes.
Among the NCPS criminal justice programmes are the creation of a new integrated fingerprint system, improved court management, tighter prison security, a victim empowerment programme and better bail administration. The most ambitious effort is the Enterprise Process Information Management programme, which will re-engineer the handling and tracking of cases from arrest to prosecution to prison and rehabilitation. Cachalia said the tender for Phase One of this project will be published this month.
In addition to the criminal justice system projects, the NCPS departments have initiated a series of projects on priority crime areas. These are targeting firearms, vehicle crime, corruption in the criminal justice system, crimes against women and children and commercial crime.
Cachalia said the border control programme was an important example of how the strategy will deliver improved crime prevention by drawing all the relevant government departments together to coordinate their actions.
In April, the Cabinet approved an NCPS task team's proposals to cut down the number of border posts open for bulk commercial traffic from 95 to 34 points before the end of the year. The programme also establishes strict standards for procedures at border posts and creates a unified border control command structure embracing Immigration, Customs and border police. This will replace the current fragmented system, which has proved vulnerable to smuggling and transnational criminal organisations.
Apart from these interdepartmental projects, the NCPS is also mobilising provincial and local governments, Cachalia said. In recent weeks six provinces have held crime-prevention summits to come up with tangible programmes to reduce crime. These have generated more than 64 specific projects. The remaining three provincial summits will be held soon.
The NCPS has been less successful in launching projects to address the areas of improving public awareness and values and strengthening environmental design to prevent crime, Cachalia said. These areas will receive increasing attention over the next year. One example is the R340 million Community Safety Centres project to integrate crime prevention services to communities, starting with one pilot site per province.
He said the cooperation among NCPS departments that had developed over the past year reflected "an entirely new way of running the government."
As the NCPS moved further into the delivery phase, the various projects were running into constraints in the form of lack of programme managers and expert staff from the different departments, Cachalia said.
The NCPS Ministers' Committee meets regularly to review progress and make sure enough resources are available to keep the ambitious NCPS agenda on track. The operational work of the NCPS is handled by the Coordinating Mechanism, a committee made up of senior officials from the NCPS departments who have been assigned responsibility for the various programmes. A small full-time team based in the Secretariat for Safety and Security assists with the coordination of the NCPS effort.
(A pack of slides for details on main programmes, in particular the detailed sections on firearms control initiative, vehicle crime project, bail project and corruption project is available on request)
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