Álvaro Morcillo, a Postdoctoral research Fellow at the Navarra Center for International Development (NCID), presented his research that looked at the relationship between crime and poverty in South Africa and how these factors are connected. “Crime drives away investment, both foreign and domestic, and consequently slows growth”, Morcillo said.

For his study, Álvaro Morcillo analysed data aggregated from the South African Social Attitudes Survey (SASAS, round 2011) and in doing so he explained that there are many indirect ways to cut down the crime rate. These included reducing inequalities, investing in education, empowering the legal system and fighting against corruption. However in spite of all these option Morcillo suggested that one of the most direct ways is to improve policing methods.

The supplemental research question then was why do people comply with the law? In order to answer this question more effectively Morcillo applied Tyler’s procedural justice model, in order to better understand why South African people cooperate with the police. This model combined different variables such as trust and legitimacy. Through his research, Morcillo found that the best predictor for cooperation with the police was actually through trust rather than legitimacy, but an important caveat worth noting is that there were some differing opinions between racial groups.

These findings demonstrate that there are needs to be a certain emphasis placed on trust, along with racial differences, when ultimately trying to reduce the element crime in South Africa.