The Contours of Disorder: Crime Maps and Territorial Policing in South Africa

Abstract

Organised vioience strongly shapes political boundaries. The modern state's monopoly on legitimate violence has made national borders the primary dividing line between peaceful and violent places. However, governments that are unable to achieve such a monopoiy may opt for the more modest goal of moderating the distribution of violent behaviour across their jurisdiction. This paper explores how this latter approach redefines the contours of political space through a grounded ethnography of crime control strategies in Johannesburg, South Africa. In the postapartheid era. South African police and vigilantes have synthesised statistically oriented policing logics with the racial policing tactics of the past to anticipate, locate, isolate, and redistribute patterns of violent crime. In so doing, they have created forms of territorial power and violence that are neither new nor old, but undeniably postsovereign.

Planning beyond Mass Incarceration

“…The harms in the law enforcement system are also highly connected to conditions and relationships in space including processes of environmental determinism where the disorder of an area, as perceived through policing, are written onto all bodies within an area (Razack 2002;Vigneswaran 2014;Jefferson 2017). Cooper et al (2004), for example, describe how residents in their study "remarked that the area's…”

“…The harms in the law enforcement system are also highly connected to conditions and relationships in space including processes of environmental determinism where the disorder of an area, as perceived through policing, is written onto all bodies within an area (Jefferson 2017; Razack 2002; Vigneswaran 2014). Cooper et al (2004, 1115), for example, describe how residents in their study “remarked that the area’s [perceived] ‘ghetto’ status gave officers license to mistreat all residents.” In a study of digital policing in South Africa, Vigneswaran (2014) describes the ways in which digitized crime maps “define the boundaries between order and disorder” providing technologically sophisticated sanction for any policing tactics, including those that cause harm, within areas designated or mapped as disorderly.…”

Border disorder: On urban boundary work and crime in the divided city

“…From an architectural and city planning perspective, Newman (1973) has proposed the concept of the ‘defensible city’, linking architecture and urban planning to violence prevention. More recently, an increasing number of studies have discussed the importance of analysing micro-places (Weisburd, 2004: 284) and examining the political dimensions of crime-related organized violence in the city (Vigneswaran, 2014).…”

Everyday security: privatized policing, local legitimacy and atmospheres of control

“…In South Africa, the black population has, generally, only experienced harsh, heavyhanded approaches to policing. Thus, stop-and-search procedures, once they have been carefully negotiated, are tolerated by the local population, as they are seen as the normal way in which policing functions (Hornberger, 2011;Steinberg, 2008;Vigneswaran, 2014).…”