Making further inquiries Policing in context in Brixton and Khayelitsha

Only rarely do inquiries into policing investigate the social context within which it takes place. This article looks at two inquiries that chose to take on this task: Lord Scarman’s into the Brixton disorders in London in April 1981; and Justice Kate O’Regan and Advocate Vusi Pikoli’s into the current state of policing in Khayelitsha in the Western Cape. It argues that they should be applauded for doing so, but draws attention to how difficult it can be to persuade governments to address the deep-rooted social and economic problems associated with crises in policing rather than focus on reforming the police institution, its policies, procedures and practices.


Making further inquiries
It is also widely recognised that their relationship with the public -the people who are policed as well as those on whose behalf policing is done -is critical to everything that the police do. This view is shared by observers whose perspectives on policing differ sharply in other respects. Thus the 'broken windows' theorists George L Kelling and James Q Wilson emphasised that scarce police resources need to be deployed to support citizens in neighbourhoods at 'the tipping point' where public order is 'deteriorating but not unreclaimable'. 3 Herman Goldstein, the founding father of problem-oriented policing, insisted that the police should focus on problems identified by the communities they serve, and seek to mobilise the public in resolving them. 4  were addressed. 6 There is then a large measure of agreement over the need to recognise three things: the limitations of the police (and, to be more specific, the public police) as guarantors of order in the face of social forces well beyond their control; the centrality of the relationship between the police and the public to effective policing; and the urgency of social and economic change if meaningful police reform is to be achieved.
So it is surprising how rarely inquiries into policing take account of the social context within which policing is done, and attend to the social conditions that gave rise to the issues the police have been charged with investigating.

Case studies
The purpose of this article is to look at the work  [W]hilst a province has no control over the policing function, it has a legitimate interest that its residents are shielded from crime and that they enjoy the protection of effective, efficient and visible policing. 18 It was common ground between the parties to the case that, under section 206 (5) problems to those of their white neighbours. 38 But they were more severe and were exacerbated by racial discrimination. 39 As a result, young black people may feel a particular sense of frustration and deprivation.

Appointment and terms of reference
Spending much of their lives on the street, they are there bound to come into contact with criminals and with the police. 40 The police appeared to many young black people 'as the visible symbols of the authority of a society which has failed to bring them its benefits or do them justice'. 41  give an indication of the issues they considered:   This may well reflect differences in the salience of policing and the police institution in their respective terms of references, but it can also be surmised that these approaches owed something to the political conditions under which the inquiries were appointed.
In the light of the reticence shown by other inquiries, set up under not dissimilar circumstances, the fact that both Scarman and O'Regan/Pikoli chose to address these issues at all is a testament to their willingness to seek explanations for poor policing beyond the actions of those responsible for delivering it, and to interpret their respective terms of reference in such a way as to permit them to do so.
What emerged from both inquiries was that people who lack a significant stake in society and feel that they get little or nothing from the state are likely to lack the trust and confidence in its agents on which public policing in a democratic society depends. And, at times of crisis, when people's only point of contact with the state may well be with the police -police that are seen as routinely acting against rather than for them -protests against the police and their actions become freighted with anger stemming from a much wider set of frustrations and resentments.
Although he did not say so in quite so many words,