Browsing by Author "Kriegler, Anine"

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    South African criminology's aetiological crisis: reflections on a century of murder
    (University of Cape Town, 2020) Kriegler, Anine; Van der Spuy, Elrena; Smythe, Dee
    South African criminology's structural aetiology is in crisis. This dissertation offers a novel account of the nature, origin, severity, implications, and possibilities of that crisis. It suggests that, rather than a normative problem, it should be understood as an empirical one, related to the challenge of crime prevalence measurement. The question of crime prevalence patterns and trends has mistakenly been treated as trivial. This dissertation conducts meta-theoretical and historical analyses to reveal a fundamental criminological quandary: making defensible and testable claims about aggregate crime prevalence patterns and trends is at once both indispensable and impossible. This dilemma is in some respects inherent to the task of primary criminology, but its origin and manifestation are also uniquely crippling and revealing in the South African context. The aetiological crisis is more severe, more fundamental, and more complex than previously thought. In demonstration of this, this dissertation seeks to establish, as defensibly as possible, just one observation about long-term South African crime prevalence trends that would seem to require explanatory effort. It collects official South African police murder statistics over the longest-possible time frame and at the lowest-possible level of aggregation and combines them with census data using Geographic Information System technology. The result is by far the most extensive and defensible possible description of South African long-term crime prevalence patterns and trends. It shows a large, unprecedented, widespread murder rate decrease from 1994 to 2011. This poses problems for existing theory and reveals the discipline's failure to even identify that which is relatively unequivocal and requires explanation. This dissertation concludes that there is an unidentified void at what should be the empirical heart of South African criminology. There is much to gain in engaging head-on the question of how to go about systematic empirical observation in the context of profound ambiguity about the meaning and measure of crime.
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    Unhoused individuals' experiences of being policed in Cape Town
    (2024) Ackermann, Jo; Kriegler, Anine; Moult, Kelley
    The present study departed from a conversation in the South African literature on the discriminatory application of by-laws to criminalise vagrancy-related behaviour and displace the unhoused. A comparative lack of interest has been given to how exactly the unhoused experience being policed, and whether this can be explained by by-law enforcement. To address this, focus groups were conducted with 28 formerly unhoused individuals who have lived on the streets of Cape Town and are now housed by community-based organisation, Streetscapes. Participants were asked about experiences of being policed, and their understandings of officers' behaviour. Their responses indicate a range of experiences, from brutal, humiliating and unjust encounters that were indicative of a lack of respect for the unhoused on the part of law enforcement, to kind and fair, rooted in empathy for their situation. The varied nature of the incidents goes beyond the enforcement of by-laws and reflects the views and choices of officers (and the residents and politicians from whom they sometimes receive instructions). The implications of these findings are therefore that policing unhoused people needs to be understood both within and outside of a legal framework. This should nuance the debate on how best to help the unhoused enjoy their rights, as an exclusive focus on reviewing discriminatory legislation may ignore factors such as personal bias and a willingness to use violence by law enforcement, and a lack of broader governmental, institutional and public support. Paying greater attention to this could ultimately shape interventions and thus more effectively address the homelessness problem in Cape Town (and perhaps elsewhere).
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    United States post-Cold War drug and trade policy and Mexico
    (2012) Kriegler, Anine
    This essay provides a framework for explanations of the drug war's failure and its incongruity with other regional interests, most notably trade. It suggests three potential theoretical interests, most notably trade. It suggests three potential theoretical approaches - a conspiracy (realist) theory, a cultural (constructivist) theory, and a compartmentalisation (bureaucratic politics) theory.