Bill Dixon

• University of Nottingham

In the early 2000s, many police forces in England and Wales set up independent advisory groups (IAGs) following an inquiry into the flawed investigation of the murder of a black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, by London's Metropolitan Police. Members of IAGs were to act as critical friends of the police providing independent advice on policies, procedu...

This article examines the relationship between politicians and the police in the days before the shooting by members of the South African Police Service of 34 striking mineworkers at the Marikana platinum mine in South Africa on 16 August 2012. Drawing on evidence presented to the official inquiry into events at Marikana, it argues that political i...

This article attempts an ambitious undertaking by scholars collaborating from far flung parts of the globe to redefine the geographic and conceptual limits of critical criminology. We attempt to scope, albeit briefly, the various contributions to criminology (not all of it critical) from Argentina, Asia, Brazil, Colombia, and South Africa. Our aim...

'Don't judge a book by its cover,' as the saying goes. At first glance, a book about the working lives and professional identities of members of the South African Police Service (SAPS) might seem to have little in common with a study of the role of 'traditional' forums in securing access to justice and human security. What does a conventional ethno...

A Country at War with Itself, Antony Altbeker’s book about ‘South Africa’s crisis of crime’, begins with the dramatic story of a robbery in which Altbeker himself was involved. One of the robbers is a man who Altbeker refers to only as ‘Pointy Face’. Beyond the unusual shape of his chin, his high cheekbones and the hardness of his muscles, readers...

In this response to Duncan Breen and Juan Nel’s article on the need for legislation to enhance the sentences imposed on those convicted of hate crime, we draw on the international literature and our own research on racially motivated offending to argue that South Africa ought to adopt a more circumspect approach than the UK and the USA if it wishes...

Although the Farlam Commission of Inquiry is yet to report, it has been widely assumed in the blogosphere, across large sections of the traditional media, and in some preliminary academic analyses too, that the shootings at Marikana on 16 August 2012 are symptomatic of a police force in thrall to a political elite intimately connected to internatio...

Only rarely do inquiries into policing investigate the social context within which it takes place. This article looks at two inquiries which chose to take on this task: Lord Scarman’s into the Brixton Disorders in London in April 1981; and Justice Catherine O’Regan and Advocate Vusumzi Pikoli’s into the current state of policing in Khayelitsha in t...

Fifty-two years separate the fatal shootings by police of 69 anti-apartheid protestors at Sharpeville on 21 March 1960 and of 34 striking miners at Marikana on 16 August 2012. The parallels between the two ‘massacres’ are easy to overstate; but both involved the use of lethal violence by the police against people taking part in insurrectionary acti...

Violent crime in South Africa has remained persistently high since the end of apartheid in 1994. Almost 16,000 murders at a rate of 31.9 per 100,000 of the population in 2010/11 attest to this. Violent crime remains a concern for government and has led one independent observer to describe South Africa as 'a country at war with itself' (Altbeker, 20...

Although the Farlam Commission of Inquiry is yet to report, it has been widely assumed in the blogosphere, across large sections of the traditional media, and in some preliminary academic analyses too, that the shootings at Marikana on 16 August 2012 are symptomatic of a police force in thrall to a political elite intimately connected to internatio...

ased on a two-year research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), this book explores why many of those involved in racially motivated crime seem to be struggling to cope with economic, cultural and emotional losses in their own lives. Drawing on in-depth biographical interviews with perpetrators of racist crimes and foc...

Antony Altbeker’s (2006) last book, The Dirty Work of Democracy, was an often brilliant popular ethnography of policing. Accessible to the general reader, it was also – at least for this reviewer (Dixon 2007) – a ‘must-have’ for anyone with a professional or academic interest in the state of the South African Police Service. Now, in this new book,...

A framework for analysing policy transfer developed by David Dolowitz and David Marsh has begun to attract the attention of criminologists interested in understanding how crime policies travel. This article uses this framework to assist in tracing the genealogy of a style of local, geographically responsible `sector' policing which is currently bei...

Hate crimes, it has been said, are ‘message’ crimes to which society needs to respond using the most powerful and unambiguous means of communication at its disposal, the criminal law. Using empirical data collected in the course of research conducted by the authors on racially motivated violence and harassment in North Staffordshire, this article s...

Crime has gained an extraordinary pre-eminence among the social problems of our age, and preventing it has become a priority for many governments around the world. This has led to some significant normative disagreements about the relationship between crime prevention and social policy. Different bodies of work warn against both the ‘criminalizatio...

Taking Brogden's (1999:167) claim that community policing is ‘as American as cherry pie’ as its starting point, the article traces the development of community policing in South Africa since the dying days of apartheid in the mid 1980s. For analytical purposes this period is divided up into three phases: prefiguration, transition and consolidation....

Maureen Cain (2000) identifies orientalism and occidentalism as features of much criminological writing on ``non–western'' societies. As alternatives to these opposite but complimentary tendencies, she argues for the possibility of mutual and reciprocal learning under conditions of interactive globalisation. The purpose of this article is to look f...

This paper takes a recent book by British criminologist Jock Young on crime and social exclusion in late modernity as a starting point for the development of a critical criminology of post-apartheid South Africa. The first section of the article locates Young's work within the British tradition of critical criminology with which he has long been as...

Les AA. examinent les reformes entreprises en Grande-Bretagne visant a renforcer la responsabilite de la police vis-a-vis des interventions qu'elle est amenee a effectuer. Ils decrivent de quelle maniere les autorites judiciaires tendent a rappeler les devoirs de la police sur le plan du maintien de l'ordre. Ils soulignent que la police britannique...

[Traditional British policing is relatively low on numbers, low on power and high on accountability;…..it is undertaken with public consent which does not mean acquiescence but a broad tolerance indicating a satisfaction with the helping and enforcement roles of policing.” (Joint Consultative Committee 1990:4)Perhaps it is time to return to basics...