An Evaluation of the South African Police Service’s Moral Right to Hold Power in the Mankweng Area
Abstract
The aim of this study was to evaluate the South African Police Service’s (SAPS’s) moral right to hold power in the Mankweng area. The researcher observed that the SAPS are largely not viewed as having the moral right to hold power. Although it may seem a truism that poor communication between the police and the community may result in lower public confidence and trust in the police, the actual relationship between the two has already been dealt with in other studies. Apart from poor communication, which is seen as a central concern, other factors could affect the image that the public holds on the police. Most of the available literature argue that confidence in the police is known to have significance on citizen’s perception of personal safety and fear of crime. The problem that therefore informs the research is that the police in Mankweng are faced up with a myriad of challenges that undermine public confidence in them. This problem has the propensity to undermine police-community relation, thus the police’s moral right to hold power in the community. This study considers the existing legislative frameworks through the lens of criminological and legal theories, namely Differential Association Theory, Procedural Justice Theory, and Social Contract Theory in order enhance transparency and provide clarity. A qualitative research approach was considered appropriate for this study since it provided the researcher with insight into the lived world of participants by obtaining rich descriptions of how these participants experience on the evaluation of SAPS’s moral right to hold power. In this study, the researcher utilised face-to-face semi-structured interviews as primary data gathering technique. For sampling purposes, 25, including Five (05) SAPS management and 20 community members, as participants, they were all interviewed in this study. The researcher followed a phenomenological data analysis process in order to provide a comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon as experienced by the participants based on evaluating SAPS’s moral right to hold power in the Mankweng area. This study found that communication breakdown, inclusive to not giving feedback and to what extend is the investigation of reported cases, failure on the part of the police to value the importance of Community Police Forums (CPF’s), always citing lack of transport to transport members of the CPF to meetings as there is lack of proper allocation and use of state vehicles, unfaithfulness and mistrust to be the main causes of the identified research problem. For recommendations, the local SAPS’s actions and an increase of unappealing practices has raised a number of safety concerns among South African citizens, neighbouring countries and perhaps international communities and it is recommended that collaboratively working on these findings can enhance policing in the communal level, such as the study area.
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