From National Security to Citizen Security

Crime rates in much of the developing world have grown significantly in recent years. Analysts relate this trend to factors including economic policies that increase unemployment, inequality and urbanization; legacies of conflict; the loosening of authoritarian controls; and demographic factors. In South Africa crime rates started to rise in 1985 and only stabilized -- at very high rates -- between 1994 and 1996. The South African government's 1996 National Crime Prevention Strategy identifies numerous causes of crime including gender inequality; access to firearms; social-psychological factors; vigilantism; inadequate support to victims of crime; youth marginalization; economic underdevelopment and inequality; poverty and unemployment; institutionalized violence in society; and the encroachment of international criminal groups (trading in drugs, arms and stolen vehicles and committing armed robbery).⁽²⁹⁾

One of the problems in analyzing causes and patterns of crime in most of the developing world is the lack of good data. Police weakness extends to the development of basic data, as well as geographical or statistical analyses of crime trends. The data police do manage to generate also has to be questioned in many countries because of very low rates of crime reporting, frequently linked to popular mistrust of police and sparse police presence or total lack of police in many rural areas. There is often a correlation between the credibility of the police and the reliability of crime data.

Many analysts use homicide rates as the hardest data available. In 1990, the last year in which comparable homicide data are available for regions of the world, sub-Saharan Africa had a rate of 40.1 homicides per 100,000 population and in Latin America and the Caribbean it was 22.9/100,000. No other region of the world had a homicide rate in excess of 9/100,000. Other analyses indicate that Latin America is the most violent region in the developing word. ⁽³⁰⁾ According to the Pan American Health Organization, in 1994 the homicide rate for the Latin America reached 28.4/100,000.⁽³¹²⁾ The most violent countries of Africa and Latin America have extraordinarily high homicide rates: South Africa's murder rate peaked in 1994 at an estimated 45/100,000; Guatemala's may be as high as 150/100,000; while Salvadoran authorities documented 117.4/100,000 homicides in 1996.⁽³²⁾

The only region in this study where crime was not a significant and growing problem was South-East Asia (there are notable exceptions including the Philippines and Indonesia).⁽³³⁾ A recent analysis of crime in Asia noted that unemployment and illegal migration contribute to street crime, but found no significant correlation between political and legal systems and crime rates. In countries such as Taiwan, Malaysia, Korea and Thailand the primary threats are pickpockets and burglars, but violent crimes such as mugging and robbery are less of a concern.

Given that regime policing appears more predominant in Asia than the other areas examined in this paper, this raises the question of whether effective regime policing may lead to lower crime. However, Asia has also experienced high levels of economic growth in much of the region, relatively good delivery of social services compared to Africa or Latin America and many countries have not experienced the rapid and massive urbanization of Latin America. These are all factors that influence crime rates, as is political culture. In Asia, the traditions of Confucianism are also sometimes offered as an explanation for high levels of social cohesion that tend to limit crime. Given that many police forces in Asia appear to suffer institutional shortcomings similar to their counterparts in Latin America and Africa, it may be that while Asian police have been fairly effective at enforcing National Security Laws, low crime rates are attributable to other influences. A more detailed study would be required to determine the relative weight of these different factors on Asia's crime rates.

Authoritarian regimes frequently control information, including crime statistics, making comparisons with previous crime levels difficult. Political transitions generally end press censorship and the new, often lurid reporting of violence and crime contributes to increasing public perceptions and fears of crime. While the perception and reality of crime rates may differ, crime has clearly increased across Africa, Latin America and elsewhere after democratic transitions. Sometimes, however, as in Argentina or Brazil, crime has become a top political issue only a decade or more after the transition from military rule. Given the state of the available data, it is extremely difficult to know how far to attribute increases in crime to the loosening of authoritarian controls as compared to the impact of the economic adjustment policies that have often accompanied or followed transitions.