Explaining theEffectiveness ofCommunity-Based CrimePrevention Practices

The crisis in the criminal justice system, especially in African nations, has been the subject of academic and policy debates with the consensus being that state apparatuses alone are incapable of improving the crime situation. As Killingray (1986) explains, the adoption and extension of indirect rule in the British colonies, especially in Africa, created a phenomenon where the British tactically retreated from close or effective control of their territories. Policing was thin and often non-existent over much of the African empire and African ‘traditional’ rulers had responsibility for the maintenance of law and order. The problem of ineffective policing still persists in postcolonial Africa. As a result, both donors and governments are seeking non-state alternatives or complements to the state apparatuses. These alternatives include private sector provision, donor-driven interventions and community-based or community-driven crime prevention practices. In Africa, there is no shortage of community-based crime prevention (CBCP) practices. They come in a variety of forms and models: neighbourhood watches, vigilantes, religious and ethnic militias, and neighbourhood guards. However, whereas the failure of the criminal justice system and formal crime prevention is hardly debatable, the effectiveness of community-based crime prevention (CBCP) practices in Africa is still a subject of controversy despite the widespread prevalence of these practices. In this study, we ask: how effective are these CBCP practices and what explains their effectiveness or ineffectiveness? We conceptualised effectiveness in terms of citizens’ perception of their safety and of the crime level in their community. We also included the extent to which they attribute these two to the CBCP in their communities. This measure has important limitations but given the problems of crime data sourcing and fidelity in Africa, we reluctantly left out official measures of crime rate reduction as an index of effectiveness of CBCP, focusing rather on the experiences and expressions of the citizens who daily bear the brunt of crimes. Through a combination of descriptive and small-N comparative case study designs, we collected primary data in four stages in a total of 18 communities in Ibadan, Nigeria. Descriptive quantitative and qualitative analyses and process tracing showed that CBCP practices were widely prevalent in Ibadan and were driven by community development associations. These practices combined elements of different non-state models such as paid security provisioning, vigilantism and neighbourhood watches. The communities also work closely with the police. Most residents described their communities as safe and crime levels as low. Importantly, most of them attributed this to their community’s CBCP practices. Social capital, community participation and communication infrastructure were high in the studied communities. These may be the factors that make it possible for the communities to organise themselves in the first instance. However, we found these factors to be equally high in both effective CBCP communities and ineffective CBCP communities. This, therefore, makes it implausible to argue that these factors explain the effectiveness of CBCP.