Local Safety Toolkit: Enabling safe communities of opportunity

Abstract

Crime, violence and the related state of unsafety are issues of deep concern for most South Africans. Criminal justice responses, despite heavy investment and efforts by the state to increase and improve capacity to ensure effective law enforcement remain inadequate to achieve safety. The Local Safety Toolkit supports a strategy for a Safe South Africa through the implementation of a model for a Safe Community of Opportunity. The model is the outcome of work undertaken over the course of the past five years and draws from widely inclusive consultation and literature review. The toolkit aims to contribute to preventive approaches to address unsafety. Unsafety is a whole-government and whole-society problem. It is only through a multi-perspective lens and the promotion and enactment of a multi-stakeholder vision at local level that communities are able to shift from being unsafe to improved safe. Local safety approaches must bring together the perspectives, understanding and vision of individual local actors in collaborative, integrative approaches to overcome the fragile social systems that are the legacy of apartheid and that perpetuate vulnerability and increase the risks of a cycle of crime and violence. This requires a systemic approach that embraces the complexity of the problem and delivers a systemic solution. Since it is implausible to expect that all or even most local safety strategies will be able to access and benefit from systems expertise within local environments, the model presented here pre-empts this shortcoming and provides a toolkit in which these concepts and theories are embedded. In line with the systems theory on which it is based, the model reflects collaboration across many disciplines, including systems theory, design thinking and innovation, visioning and ICT. It proposes ways of overcoming shortcomings of human capacity and management at local level, it promotes innovation and it harnesses technology to provide a systemic approach to local safety. The model, a Safe Community of Opportunity, is proposed as the core of a national strategy in which what is learned and experienced locally informs an adaptive process that is responsive both to changing needs and to progress towards safety in individual communities