THE Windhoek City Police are paving the way for a modern approach to tackling crime, focusing on prevention rather than action after a crime has been committed.
This strategy, which was first implemented last year, aims to create a partnership with communities to create crime-intolerant zones in neighbourhoods. According to City Police Chief Abraham Kanime, the new strategy is based on ‘problem solving, community policing’ and a proactive approach that concentrates on ‘tackling the underlying causes’. While traditional police work will always have a place, there is a major shift from ‘incident-driven’ action to prevention tactics. The new policing strategy devised over the last two years can be encapsulated by the motto ‘we don’t fight crime, we prevent it’.’Our efficiency should be the absence of crime and disorder. The test of our efficiency should be the absence of action,’ Kanime says The City Police’s strategy changed in 2010, after a four-year period which Kanime describes as the ‘storming era’.He describes the new era as an era of ‘norming’ – a ‘systematic and thorough approach’ to crime, requiring a focus on data collection and a close relationship between the police and the community. ‘The new strategy is not to sit and wait for crime. We have a strategy, we are not just operating in a vacuum, we have objectives and they are attainable.’The first step in that strategy is to decrease crime by 50 per cent, and for that, the police ‘collect statistics on everything’. ‘We have set benchmarks. In order to achieve something, you have to measure it.’This objective is carefully monitored during weekly meetings between Kanime and his colleagues, who collect and supervise databases that show which crimes are committed, where and how often.By the end of 2015, the City Police aim to reduce crime by 75 per cent.Statistics show that housebreaking, car burglary, robbery and other daily crimes have decreased dramatically during the past three years, especially in zones where the police have installed CCTV cameras.The cameras, bicycle patrols, zoning and community partnerships form part of the ‘four pillars of crime prevention’ by which the City Police operate. The first pillar is zonal policing, the second is community policing, the third is the use of technology and the fourth is crime intelligence. Crime intelligence is the gathering of statistics on repeat offenders and gathering information from the public to prevent crimes from taking place.’As a result, there is a higher rate of prevention and detection,’ Kanime explains.Windhoek, according to Kanime, is a difficult society to police.’We have 350 000 residents, and out of that close to 75% are living in informal settlements. The majority of the youth are unemployed. And it is a multi-cultural society.’ The biggest problems in the city remain alcohol abuse and shebeens. But Kanime says the City Police, together with the national police and residents, are facing challenges which can be measured, and overcome. For that, he intends to empower residents. ‘We need to reduce the fear, we need to empower the people and we need to positively influence the quality of life.’
