Biography

Jim Harding was born, in Wales in 1934, into a family with a strong military heritage. He emigrated to Canada in 1967, after having served in the British Army for three years, and as a police officer in Wales for twelve. Upon arrival in Canada he became a police officer in the Halton Regional Police Service near Toronto. In 1979 he was appointed Chief of Police of that region. From the early 1970s on he worked hard to develop a Community Based Policing approach within his jurisdiction. This is work of which he is, justifiably, very proud.

"We were not just paying it lip service. We had 50% of all our resources dedicated to the concept of community based policy. The result was that, for 12 consecutive years we cut down the rate of committed crime, and for 12 years we had less crime per 1000 head of population than any other municipality in North America. We did that with resources, which were far below the provincial averages of the ratio of police officers to citizens, and at a far reduced budget. It was a tremendous accomplishment."

At the time Mr. Harding was also chair of the police multicultural liaison committee for the Canadian Association of the Chiefs of Police. He was a member of the aboriginal policing community, and was also selected to be a member of the Canadian Minister of Multiculturalism advisory committee. In his own words he was, "fighting against racial and cultural discrimination ever since 1970."

In 1991 Jim Harding was approached by a Canadian Government funded body called the South African Trust Fund (see John Harker Interview) which, among other activities, sent Canadians to South Africa to work as consultants on a variety of transition issues. There was great concern at the time about how the role of the police must change in post-apartheid South Africa. Jim was asked to go to South Africa on a fact finding mission about the then state of policing and how it should, and could, be changed. The product of that trip is contained in a report entitled "Report on Policing in the Republic of South Africa."

Following heart surgery in 1994, Jim retired from the police service. He is currently head of the Investigative Services for the Ontario Attorney General, Special Investigations Unit (SIU) (*). Essentially, the purpose of the SIU is to, "investigate when the police shoot and kill somebody, or somebody dies in custody." Jim Harding firmly believes that: "The police in a democracy must be accountable. There must be oversight, because that will help the public to place their confidence and trust in the police. That's also very much required in South Africa, more so than any country in the world at this particular time."

Jim returned to South Africa a second time in 1993 to give a series of presentations and seminars about the viability of using the Community Based Policing approach in South Africa. In the following interview, Mr. Harding discusses his experiences during his two trips to South Africa, as well as his profound commitment to a more community oriented style of policing.

Note: Throughout this interview (*) indicates a link to relevant links at the bottom of the page.

Interview

Going to South Africa

[Before I left] I was given some documentation about the general scene in South Africa, but I was really going into it fairly blind. For example, I had no idea of the state of committed crime up there. People lived there with a siege mentality. Every one of their crime categories is almost out of control. They have a very very difficult policing problem there from that point of view alone: You couple that with the fact that members of the South African police force were then obliged to enforce the requirements of apartheid. It casts the police in South Africa in the role of being anti-public; that is if you're not a white South African. So it's very very difficult for them.

Funding for the (South African Trust) project came from the Canadian government, through CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) (*). I'm Welsh by birth but I'm Canadian by choice. As a Canadian I was proud of the Canadian government for doing that. The world could have sat idly by, looked down it's nose at South Africa for the way in which they were conducting themselves, and did nothing. Canada chose not to do that.

I got involved in some pretty thorny situations out there, in particular in my visits to various police stations and into various areas. I was in Pretoria, I was in Hammerskrall, I visited Alexandria, Soweto (*), and Keilitcha, which is the flats of Cape Town. I was involved in quite a number of things there as an observer of police conduct and of public demonstrations.

I've been around the world as a soldier and I've seen quite a bit. But, I've never seen such glaring, obvious and offensive poverty as that which was in the squatters estates in South Africa. I had no idea that such squalor and poverty existed on such a large scale. For example, in Keilitcha you could walk a mile and a half before you could find a place that could be loosely described as a toilet. The sanitation there was just appalling - it was non-existent. There are thousands, upon thousands, upon thousands, of people living in a squatters area with about a dozen urinals for their use. It's not going to work.

Saying that, I'm not meaning to condemn the police for that. There are a variety of causes of criminal conduct. It's not just the police, or the law, or the personal tendencies of the individual involved. There's all sorts of causative factors for the results of crime, and they are very evident in South Africa. The South Africa government was then trying to do something about it, but it was an enormous problem. To find decent accommodation and housing for all those who are without; it's a mind boggling proposition.

I spoke to senior officers out there who were as hard as a bucket of nails. Really tough people, because they had a tough job to do. And, they virtually broke down and cried and sobbed and became very emotionally distressed at some of the things they were required to do. They didn't like what they'd been doing, wanted to get out of it, wanted to get back to real policing in the worst way. But, on the other hand, I saw some commanders out there who believed that this was the way it should be, and who wanted to, as one of them told me, "hang de Klerk," when he made his proclamation in the South African parliament that apartheid would be abolished.

They were apprehensive about me. But, I got over that by not proclaiming, on behalf of myself, or Canada, things that we had no right to claim. We can't proclaim perfection in race relations in Canada because of the situation with aboriginal people. I believe that no country is without question marks over its conduct and its relationships with people. In Canada it's the same. I put that on the table for them and I think that gained me a tremendous amount of credibility. I was never treated with hostility by their officers; I was treated with some reserve and some caution on quite a number of occasions, but that was understandable. I dealt with that when I found it. I must say I was never met with any obstruction.

Policing, Crime, and Other Experiences

When South Africa decided to abandon apartheid, and take upon itself the process of democracy, it was recognised that the police service would be very much impacted by that decision. There was a strong desire on the part of people in the justice system - and I think in policing itself - to move to what they called community based policing. Of course that was almost an impossible first step for them.

They first off had to move into a position where they could do the reactive type of policing, which was then, and still is now, very much in demand because of the significant crime problem they have in South Africa.

Their police force is over 80 000 strong [this is very big], and they had a large number of civilian assistance as well. It was a very military type of police force. Apartheid thrust them into that sort of a role. They had units out there who dressed in camouflage and flack suits to do their general duty. In riot controls and things like that, it was not a police service. It was an army in many of its aspects.

The command of the South African police is very much like the military. It's regulatory and autocratic. Community based policing can't survive in that sort of an environment because you have to decentralise decision making authority in a community based policing organisation. That's why many police services are still paying it lip service and not practising it.

Police officers in South Africa are no different from police officers in Canada, they are very resistant to change. When you bring change to that police service it has the same impact on them as it has on us; the second guessing, why is this, why is that, let's obstruct this for a while, let's delay that for a while, let's not change because this situation is like a comfortable glove to us. Despite the fact they want to get out of apartheid, they want to lock into a certain style of policing that they've developed, and that's got to go.

The initiative for that change has got to come from the top. So you've got to be making a very careful review of the senior officers, their mind set, and their predisposition to change, to having the courage to dare upon something new, innovative and untried. They need to be adventurous in what they try to do in policing in South Africa. They remain in the traditional style of policing, and only meet force with force - and they meet a lot of force out there. It's dangerous to be a police officer in South Africa.

Crime

[There is a very high rate of crime in South Africa. In the past] a lot of the committed crimes were hidden behind political agendas. But, it came down to, "I'm committing this crime because I want money, or because I want possessions, or because I'm a criminal." The racist and apartheid shroud was used to cover a lot of activity. Now that's gone, but a lot of the criminal activity is still there.

A lot of the violence in demonstrations, and marches, and huge tumultuous gatherings is gone. But, we are still left with a crime situation. Given the fact that there's very poor accommodation, there's very poor health resources, there's very poor education and there's very poor employment. Those crime factors - according to criminologists I've spoken to -would have been there anyway, whether apartheid would have been there or not. It's been escalated by apartheid - there's no doubt about that - because apartheid focused [advantages] on the white and not on the black.

Police Training

The standard of police training out there was just abominable. There was one set of training for white Afrikaans officers, a different set for brown people, and different set for black people. And, there were the Kits Constables. I don't know if they've still got those, but these were black people recruited into the ranks of policing. They were heavily armed, extremely poorly trained, and turned loose on the squatter settlements, to be black policemen of black offenders, or black demonstrators.

Some of those people were very, very questionable. Some might have been good at what they were going to do and had an honest intent. But I saw that as just a strategy by the apartheid government to set black against black, to take the heat off the white. I think most people recognized that. Everybody that I spoke to, more or less, were convinced of that and didn't like it. The police officers didn't like the Kits Constables because they regarded them as being totally incompetent, and the public didn't like them because they saw them as being lackeys for the government against their particular position. Nobody had any faith in the Kits constables.

Training was very very poor. It's not that the training officers are not competent, the South African police training officers are as competent as anyone else. Their senior command officers are as competent as anyone else. It wasn't their incompetence which led to the demise of the South African police force, it was their requirement to police apartheid.

Black Police Officers

I can't prove this, but it's my personal opinion that the majority of black officers who were promoted to what we call commissioned rank - that's inspector or above - this was done as tokenism. None of the black senior officers that I interviewed had been properly trained to do their job.

For example, I went to one station outside of Pretoria where there was a Lieutenant-Colonel who was in command of the station. I had asked to go to a station because I'd seen enough of the brass. I wanted to see what was happening where the rubber meets the road: how do they go about deploying their men, how do they give them their assignments, how do they go about doing the work that we do here on a daily basis.

I went to the station just about dusk. At this time there was a large crowd gathering around this particular police station. They were singing and shouting, and hooting and hollering, that's all, nobody's going to get killed from that. So I spoke to this black Lieutenant-Colonel about the operation of his unit, the command of the station and the men. He didn't have much comprehension of what I was talking about; couldn't really get down to answering my questions with any authority whatsoever. But, a white Afrikaans Sergeant interjected and said, "this is how the unit works: A B C D E F G." That [the fact that the black superior knew less than his white inferior] rang loud bells to me.

Then I asked to go outside to speak to the crowd. "Hmmm," was the reply. There were about 60-70 heavily armed men in the station at this particular time, and they were sort of besieged in there. There was no going out and patrolling the neighborhood. They were just sitting in the station. Eventually I said, "coming or not, I'm going out there." They tried to stop me, and I said, "no, I want to go out, I have nothing to fear."

So I went out, and I raised my hand to one guy, and he raised his hand to me. I went across to talk to him. I told him I was from Canada; I was very well received and welcomed. Then I told him I was a police officer, "eek," it got a little icy for a while. I told him what I was doing there: we were trying to help the South African police to move to a better style of policing. Those people couldn't have done enough for me. So I said to him, "why don't you come inside the station and speak to the station commander" - I'm talking now to the leader of this group - "If we go in there we'll get killed," was their impression; and the impression of the police was, "if we go out there, we'll get killed."

I had quite a long conversation with them and they told me the same thing, "look we don't want to be at war with the police, we want a good relationship with the police, we want to be treated properly by the police." They weren't asking for anything, any citizen in this country doesn't ask for.

Daily Operations

The day to day operation of this particular station was far removed from anything that a police station should be. They were seized with a siege mentality. There was no routine patrolling or responding to incidence. I asked to see their occurrence books, of things that were reported to the police and how they responded to them. A crime would be reported and they would take little or no notice of this. There would be a note made in the book, but very little, if any, follow up.

At night time there would be no patrolling because they would all be standing by, waiting for the large riot to take place, or the large demonstration to take place. So they were locked totally into significant, reactive style policing: "if something is going to happen, we better have the troops here to respond to it." The police station that I saw was full of people who were waiting around, heavily armed, to do something.

In other areas, especially in white suburbs, they were operating like police stations should operate; doing the services that they should do. The black population was marginalised by the police because they didn't receive the same quality of service. They had a different level of training for white officers, and a different level of response to the white community as opposed to the black community. Everything was bent out of shape. That's not the product of the evilness of one man, that's the product of legislation which was offensive, tyrannical, and racist.

On Hope

The tragedy of this situation is that too many people think the situation is insurmountable. If people approach the problem with that sort of mind set, it's not likely to get solved. I prefer to take a very positive view of what can happen, and what will happen in South Africa.

I hold this positive view more strongly now than before I went to South Africa. Because I met so many people of different races and cultures and from different bands or tribes or homelands there, and so many police officers that had a very strong determination to get back to democracy. The number of people I met who took the position that they didn't want any skeletons dragged out of the closets, they wanted a better relationship with the government, they wanted a better relationship with the police, and they wanted their children in particular to be the beneficiaries of this new environment. They were excited about this.

They all recognized that there were tremendous problems that had to be resolved. Nevertheless, there was a strong will and determination on the behalf of many of the police officers that I met - senior officers and junior officers - and many members of the public. That it is a difficult task is beyond doubt, but a faint heart never resolved any problem.

I spoke to the mother of a child who had been crippled in an attack by various tribesmen. The mother witnessed the father being hacked to death, she was stabbed through the stomach with a machete, and the girl was hit on the head and the arm - almost severed her arm - and it left her paralyzed. Even the mother of that child was hopeful for the future. I was so humbled by that women. Here she is, witnessed the death of her husband, the attempt to kill her came pretty close, and here's the attempt to kill her child. If a person such as that can be optimistic, why can't I?

People will hurt and they'll vex from time to time, and they'll critically condemn what was - it deserves to be condemned, it should be condemned, it should never be allowed to be resurrected again - but, when a women like that says there's hope for the future, I can do no less but to at least match that.

Afterthoughts

My trip to South Africa changed me. I've done an awful lot of work on racial and cultural discrimination to try to eliminate racism and to secure racial and cultural harmony. I've done an awful lot of work, more than most people. But, it becomes clear to me that I haven't done enough. More people need to put their efforts where their mouth is, or where their conscience is. More people need to do that; more countries need to do that.

I think the imposition of sanctions on South Africa when it embarked upon its Apartheid process caused the world to withdraw it's support and recognition for South Africa. Therefore, there was no interchange of ideas about growth, technologies, management, or whatever. So it languished, and it fell behind in a variety of areas. Now, I think the world has grown so much in it's competency, in a variety of areas, since that time that there's hardly a country in the world that hasn't something or some contribution in some field it can help South Africa with. There are countries with particular skills or experiences that they can share with South Africa. They need to be brought up to snuff in a variety of areas.

Apart from that, it was a tremendous mistake embarking upon apartheid, it was like Napoleon attacking Russia or Hitler doing the same. This was a no win situation. It was a wrong decision. But, Germany was helped after WWII, and that's the way it should be. Now South Africa's got to be helped, and it has got to be helped financially. It's got to be helped by sending people with knowledge and expertise to help them in various fields. Canada has done that, and hopefully Canada will continue to do that. I don't see the 1991 Proclamation (*) [essentially ending apartheid] by de Klerk (*) as a signal for us to back off. I see the proclamation, and the appointment of the new government, as a signal for us to become more energetic.

I've traveled a little bit around South Africa, and it's one of the most compellingly beautiful countries in the world. And, very often I thought to myself, "I've met people to match the landscape," wonderful people, be they white, black, brown or any other colour in between. It's easy for you or I to be good; it's easy for us to have a good mind set because we've suffered no trauma. They can have this sort of mind set despite the trauma they've gone through.

When I witness the life that my granddaughter has had, that my children have had, I see that we've had it pretty easy, pretty cushy. When you see children, and men and women, starving, with no possessions - the only thing that they possess is the day that they are living in, and there's no guarantee that they're going to get to the end of that - it's a pretty sad and sorry circumstance.

If anyone is so short sighted as to think that there is any one solution to this problem, they are so wrong. Policing is just one the faces of this very hard problem. There's a tremendous amount of work to be done in that particular regard. Housing, health, education, employment, all of these are the causative factors to the situation in South Africa.

My sympathy at this particular time was with Nelson Mandela (*). So much is expected of him. People want instant solutions to extensive problems and the man is not capable of doing that. Nelson Mandela is now one of my heroes. And, de Klerk is one of my heroes, because that man demonstrated tremendous courage when he got up and made that proclamation. As far as I'm advised, he took no consultation from his cabinet. I interviewed some of those people, and they were just appalled and could have fallen off their chairs in the house when he made his proclamation. When I asked some of them, "how did you feel at the time he made it?" Several said they wanted to shoot him. But, when they had the debate with him about this, he convinced them that it was the right road for South Africa and they supported him. It took tremendous courage to do what he did. If ever there was a hero for modern day South Africa that needs to be recognized, it's de Klerk, and Mandela.

Final Words

I hope organizations and associations [with interests in South Africa] will do something to educate the world about what it's like in South Africa. And, to do something tangible to help the people of South Africa. Whether it's through government, or organizations and associations, or members of the public, they need our help, and I think it would be unconscionable for us not to offer that help and provide it if it's asked for.

I've read the accounts of what's been happening in South Africa since, and I know the difficulties are enormous and I know that the road being traveled is being traveled very slowly. But, the longest journey taken starts with the first step.

Notes: Reactive vs. Community Based Policing

"Reactive policing is incident driven, community based policing is needs driven... Reactive policing is really just the police reacting to a crime or an incident, responding to it, going into the area to find the criminal, and leaving with the criminal. It does nothing to cement relationships with the community. There's a definition of community based policing which you might find helpful: Community Based Policing is the voluntary and willing co-operation between the police and the public, in which community concerns are identified, and in which a mutual, satisfactory response is developed by both the police and the community. " (Back to the top.)

Relevant Links

• African National Congress (ANC)
• Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)
• Canadian Involvement in South Africa from 1976 on
• Life Under Apartheid
• Nelson Mandela
• The South African Elections
• The Soweto Uprisings