Verdict: carrot
Crime has become sort of a national pastime in South Africa – or at least it feels that way, with everyone talking about the latest in security gates and tazers, or someone they know having become a recent vitcim. Worse, it doesn’t appear as if government has any idea what to do about it (other than turning the police into a trigger happy, quasi-millitary force). But then there’s Anthony Altbeker who’s spent a decade as a criminologist, and who offers a number of solutions to the crime epidemic in his 2008 book A Country at War with Itself: South Africa’s Crisis of Crime.
The book has resurfaced in the media, with this take from one Samaoen Osman, who writes to the Business Day about Altbeker from Abu Dhabi:
A person in SA is 20 times more likely to be murdered than someone in western Europe and 80 times more likely than someone in Japan. The South African government is in denial about the scourge of crime and violence, the highest in the world. South Africans are robbed, raped, murdered and suffer high levels of criminal violence.
No wonder then that, as anyone who has visited SA will know, violent crime is now a national obsession. Houses are surrounded by barbed wire and electric fences and signs everywhere warn potential criminals that they will be met with an “armed response” if they try anything.
Given such a state of affairs, the book and polemic by Anthony Altbeker, who has spent more than 10 years as a criminologist doing such things as shadowing detectives, is particularly timely.
Mr Altbeker opens by recounting his own terrifying experience of crime: he was in a fast food restaurant held up by armed thugs and only survived because the gun belonging to one of the criminals jammed.
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