Free Market Foundation launches initiative to address violent crime

The Free Market Foundation (FMF) and its rule-of-law project have launched an initiative aimed at making South Africa safer by helping police focus on real crime and decriminalising those law-abiding citizens who do no harm.

The FMF says it aims to place the country’s violent crime crisis at the centre of the national agenda in the run-up to the May elections. It said its Section 12 initiative hopes to ensure that the various political parties vying for power begin to take violence seriously.

Martin van Staden, FMF head of policy, said it is an election year yet no political party is treating violent crime in South Africa as exceptional.

“Everyone just wants to 'enforce the law better', when the crisis in fact represents a far deeper problem in the logic of our criminal justice system,” he said.

The FMF says the success of its Section 12 initiative depends on South Africans making their voices heard by endorsing the initiative to their preferred political parties. 

The public can share content on www.section12.org.za to make sure the government is held accountable. The FMF said simply “policing harder” would not fundamentally solve the crisis of violence.

“The entire criminal justice system must be reformed for a safer South Africa,” Van Staden said.

This included widespread decriminalisation of activities that South Africa should not waste precious resources criminalising, and significantly decentralising police powers away from the central government. 

The decriminalisation of activities that cause no harm to liberty or property would be positive for society and for the economy, yielding more business activity in the decriminalised areas of commerce, he said.

As part of its initiative, the FMF will seek clarity, through a Promotion of Access to Information Act request to the correctional services department, about who is presently filling South Africa’s very limited prison capacity.

The FMF said given the extent to which the government has criminalised peaceful and voluntary behaviour, it is highly likely that many prisoners do not appropriately belong in prison in the first place. 

“Most South Africans underestimate the degree of criminalisation that surrounds us. Various activities that might ordinarily be regarded as innocuous are viewed by politicians as criminal,” said Van Staden. 

Precious police, prosecutorial and prison resources were wasted when these could be directed at the very real violent crime crisis, he said. As a long-term project, the initiative seeks to create a publicly accessible database of all offences recognised in South African law.

“This will enable ordinary people, for the first time in South African history, to get an accurate and comprehensive account of whether they are regarded as criminals according to some obscure legislation or regulation that nobody has ever heard of.” 

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