Cybercrime Policing Collaboration in South Africa: Exploring A Stakeholder Approach

The sophistication of crimes committed using Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has become a policing challenge for law enforcement globally. The complexity with the policing of economic cybercrime is that law enforcement’s primary orientation focuses on traditional crime, and processes on how to handle cybercrime are lacking. Conversely, policing cybercrime for organisations has a corporate governance aspect to it. This is because governance instruments such as the business continuity plan (BCP), disaster recovery plan (DRP) and response plans are necessary to ensure business continuity in case of any eventuality. For instance, after a cyber-incident, the organisation’s priority is to restore operations and to protect critical ICT infrastructure. This has a negative bearing on policing because law enforcement might not get an opportunity to investigate timeously. The effective policing of economic cybercrime cannot be isolated to one entity. Cross sectoral partnerships between law enforcement and organisations in South Africa (SA) are required in addressing knowledge and capacity issues. However, collaboration between police and organisations is complex since both stakeholders have different interests. Organisations need to be profitable and satisfy their board members’ interests. While law enforcement has a responsibility to satisfy the public interests by ensuring that there is order and that the law is being upheld. Personal interviews conducted with cyber experts will provision insight as it pertains to the extent to which organisations are willing to commit in partnering with a stakeholder that does not explicitly contribute towards their value creation. Similarly, insight on how the enacted cyber related legislature has affected organisations in handling individuals’ personal information will be gained. Furthermore, interviews with academics in the cybersecurity discipline will provision insight on the relevance of police and organisations’ collaboration in addressing cybercrime in SA. Moreover, insight on how saturation of the collected data was attained will be provisioned.