Community policing: ‘Cherry pie’ ormelktert?

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. Although state policing provided by the South African Police (later Police Service) is the main focus of the review, it is argued that developments can usefully be seen in terms of the changing and contingent resolution of tensions between: competing civil and state-centred notions of community policing; between reactive crime-fighting or law enforcement, and proactive community-based or problem-oriented, approaches to state policing; and, finally, between more or less aggressive accounts of state-centred community policing. An extended conclusion considers the current state of community policing in South Africa and suggests that, while it is yet to become as South African as melktert, it is not quite as American as ‘cherry pie’ either.