Citizenry participation within public institutions and processes: a community’s police?

This paper grapples with some of the challenges related to the meaningful realisation of citizen participation in democratic governance, through an examination of the participation of citizens in the co-production of the rule of law and the governance of security in the context of Community Policing Forums (CPFs), established by the South African Police Services post 1994. These forums were established ostensibly to realise some of the principles of participatory democracy provided for in the final Constitution, namely to create a system of democratic governance that would ‘ensure accountability, responsiveness and openness’.