Crime prevention goes abroad: Policy transfer and policing in post-apartheid South Africa

Loader and Walker have warned that ideas about order ‘always travel with culturally specific baggage’, ‘never adapt easily to [their] new environment’ and thus ‘always risk hubristic failure’. My aim is to offer an exemplar of this hubristic failure. I chart the infusion of Anglo-American ideas of crime prevention into the policing institutions of South Africa’s young democracy. These ideas bore a bloated conception of urban security which inadvertently stimulated, and thus helped to keep alive, a similarly bloated conception of security that lay at the heart of apartheid thinking. Dressed in the garb of crime prevention, a modified version of the paramilitary policing practices that flourished under apartheid returned to the streets of democratic South Africa.