Emeritus Professor Elrena van der Spuy
Elrena is an Emeritus Professor of Criminology at the University of Cape Town. She is the former Head of the Centre of Criminology as well as the former Head of the Department of Public Law in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cape Town.
Her substantive areas of inquiry have included the structural evolution of the police in modern South Africa; the dynamics of policing under conditions of counter-insurgency in the 1980s; the impact of transitional politics on the form and function of the police; the narrative accounts of transition amongst key criminal justice incumbents, and the history of public inquiries into police, 1910-2015.
The complexity and ambiguities associated with the subculture of police organisations has been a long standing research interest. Finally, using the South African case study as a point of departure has allowed her to explore the challenges confronting police in other post colonies.