programme under the Pentecostal Church, funded by the City of Cape Town, to prevent violence, mediate between gangs and rehabilitate their members. Five ‘interrupters’, all former senior gang members, are employed along with the same number of outreach workers; there are also four data capturers and researchers. The team monitor security events using a system of ‘shot-spotters’, microphones installed on street lights linked to a Google Earth system and cellphones. This technology allows real-time monitoring of shootings, and immediate intervention and mediation. Although they share ‘analytical’ information, the police here are little trusted or used. Indeed, there are claims that the increasingly heavy weapons used here – including 16- and 21-shot Uzis – have found their way into Hanover Park from police armouries.
Father Engel has plenty on his plate, with an average of between 40 and 50 murders a year. During May 2016, for example, 325 gunshots were logged in the township, with five dead and eight wounded from 36 gang-related incidents, about 30 per cent of which were related to drugs and turf wars. The rest of the violence, the pastor notes, is ‘sporadic’ – often tit-for-tat attacks. The day before we visited Ceasefire, Father Engel’s NGO, two gangsters were shot in retributive gunfights, one of them a bodyguard of just 15.
Gangs are a way of life, Father Engel admits, among Hanover Park’s 55 000 people. Unemployment is endemic here, despite the city’s relatively low overall rate of joblessness (21.1 per cent) compared to the South African average of 36.3 per cent. Gang members often leave school early, earning their ‘rank’ in prison – known as the ‘University of Crime’ – in a strict hierarchy defined by ‘generals’, ‘captains’ and ‘shooters’. Violent activities centre on the borders between the ganglands, where there is little movement of people, or where lighting is poor at night.
He says that the proportion of high-risk individuals in Hanover Park is less than 8 per cent of the population. ‘If you can get the violence out of the areas, just like you would use a toilet and sewer to remove waste, then a solution is possible.’ This is not easy, however, in an area where confidence is low, transport to places of work costly and insecurity pervasive. Father Engel has stepped in where the state has failed, stabilising the situation. But, for this to stick, more than a civil-society initiative is required. Sustained policing that deploys available technologies is one aspect, increasing the police-to-population ratio, averaging 439 officers per 100 000 people in Cape Town (with some areas, such as certain townships, well above this figure) towards the international norm of 220 to 100 000.26 There is an overlap between the lack of policing attention and the rates of violence, where just 15 areas of the city, says its mayoral security chief J.P. Smith, account for half the crime.27 Still, more will be needed, says Father Engel, ‘to create alternatives – jobs. If we can create jobs for just 10 per cent of them, then the rest will start dreaming.’ It is not surprising that in those police precincts in the Cape characterised by high murder levels, there are high levels of socio-economic inequality and increasing unemployment.28
Africa is not the only continent that has grappled with such challenges. Seemingly hopeless situations can quickly be turned around, within a generation. The story of Medellín, Colombia, illustrates this promise.
What success looks like
The turnaround of Medellín, the second-largest city in Colombia, has in part been due to better leadership and city planning. But it has also been made possible by a changed security environment in the city once eponymous with the drug lord Pablo Escobar.
Medellín once boasted the highest rates of violent crime in the world, reaching nearly 7 000 murders a year at the peak of Pablo Escobar’s reign in the early 1990s. By 2008, the figure was down to little more than 1 000 homicides, falling to 658 by 2014.29 In 1991, to use a different measure, Medellín experienced 381 homicides per 100 000 residents, twice as much as the rate 20 years later in Ciudad Juárez, then the epicentre of Mexico’s drug war. By 2015, Medellín had the same homicide rate as Washington DC.30
The spark for these improvements and the economic growth that followed came 20 years earlier, when Escobar was tracked down and killed by the authorities in a Medellín barrio in December 1993. His end signalled the advent of a new security and intelligence regime, a renewed war on drugs, and a whole-of-government approach to dealing with security and development.31 The election of the government of President Álvaro Uribe in 2002 in particular saw a dramatic turnaround in Colombia’s security situation by providing increased resources to the security services, greater spending on infrastructure and attention to detail by leadership to even the most remote areas of Colombia. This set in motion a process that enabled a truce to be agreed with the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (known as FARC) by the end of 2016.32
Policing is now controlled from Medellín’s high-tech dispatch centre located in the mayoral offices, where officers monitor feeds on giant television screens. The capabilities of the police have also grown hugely. By 2015, for example, there were 10 211 police officers for the estimated 3.5 million citizens living in the wider metropolitan area around Medellín,33 virtually double the number deployed 15 years earlier.34 At the same time, the quality of policing has improved, notably because of a higher percentage of graduate officers in the force35 and improved cooperation with the military.
Medellín is now a global trendsetter in urban development. For the city, as for Colombia as a whole, security has been the door through which much else has followed. There have also been important changes in the planning and infrastructure of the city, along with a realisation that security, like growth, depended on a different operating system, using public spaces better and linking outlying areas with the central business district (CBD). The Integral Urban Project provided the city’s so-called ‘gondola’ transport system of cable cars, which now connect various outlying informal settlements across extreme topography to the metro system and thus to the city centre. The project also encouraged development around the metro stations in the form of libraries and green spaces.
Line J of Medellín’s Metrocable network now passes over La Comuna 13, one of the city’s toughest barrios. Inaugurated in 2007, the funicular transport system connects the 28 000 inhabitants of the comuna, and others, to the centre of the city. The journey, which would once have taken hours of travelling up and down winding, narrow roads, takes 10 minutes, and costs just $1.
Looking down at the rusted tin roofs and red-brick dwellings perched on the hillside, a local policeman observed in 2014: ‘We had a problem at the start of the cable car. The locals were shooting at it from the ground.’ The security problem was solved by improved patrolling. Line J, one of three spanning the city, carries 30 000 people a day, the cable cars travelling quickly over the barrios at 16 kilometres per hour, dispatching people efficiently to San Javier Station, at the bottom, and at La Aurora, on the top of the hillside 2.7 kilometres away.
Once at San Javier Station, commuters hop onto the Metro, first opened for service in 1995, and built by a Spanish–German consortium. Smart and litter-free, the system’s 27 stations and modern carriages are a symbol of the change in Medellín’s fortunes. Once the town of Escobar, the city is now the epicentre of Colombia’s mining and manufacturing industries. The Metro carries half a million passengers daily, including 350 000 residents from the north-eastern quarter, where many of the working class live. It is breaking down the barriers between once disparate poor and rich areas, and enabling new business growth.
With construction costs for the Metrocable at $10 million per kilometre and the Metro itself costing $2 billion, developing the city’s transport system was a bold step. The use of the Metro as a development axis was recognised by Medellín’s planners as critical in meeting the city’s modern needs in a period of social change and instability. Medellín’s urban growth since the 1960s had filled the entire Aburra Valley with communities, where harsh living conditions were heightened by drug trafficking, joblessness and violence.
In this positive cycle, improved security has led to economic prosperity, which, in turn, has cemented
