Johannesburg  - "Dress right dress!" Thuli Tshabalala barks at a line-up of 24 community policing volunteers warming up for a patrol in central Johannesburg.

"Forward step, back step," the burly female patrol instructor orders, prompting a jumbled shuffling of feet.

On a freezing winter's morning, members of the city's Community Policing Forum are readying to comb the crime-ridden streets of the inner city for "tsotsis" (thugs in township slang).

"I want to fight crime. There are too many tsotsis," Beatrice Sibisi, a 58-year-old street trader says simply.

Sibisi wears a blanket knotted around her waist sarong-style and thick socks thrust into a pair of Crocs. Most of the other volunteers, who range in age from 23 to 58 and are nearly all street traders, have assorted their Community Policing t-shirts with jeans and sneakers.

This mixed group of South Africans and migrants from Zimbabwe and Malawi may not look like a crack crime-fighting force. But in the war against the towering crime rates that cast a pall over life in the Rainbow Nation, police are taking all the reinforcements they can get.

Armed with a few batons and cans of pepper spray, the patrollers swarm through bustling inner-city market streets, a police inspector in tow, in search of weapons and drugs and to clamp down on public drinking and illegal trading.

Within an hour, over a dozen men have been handcuffed for various crimes, including assault, and shoved into the back of a police van.

Frustrated at seeing about 50 people murdered each day, many gunned down by robbers on the street or in their homes, ordinary South Africans are rolling up their sleeves while police are also demanding relaxed rules of engagement.

In both cases, the approach is pro-active: get them before they get you.

In middle-class suburbs, private security guards armed with assault rifles patrol the streets in beefed-up pickups in search of suspicious-looking people, whom they stop and question in an attempt at crime deterrence.

House and garden alarms that are linked to the security company and CCTV cameras complete the anti-crime arsenal in these areas.

In poorer neighbourhoods, the residents are pounding the beat, either as members of statutory Community Policing Forums, which are attached to police stations, or as vigilantes, pure and simple.

Sometimes the distinction is blurry.

One of the patrollers in central Johannesburg gives a young Zimbabwean immigrant a wallop to the head when he tries to wriggle out of a body search.

The youngster looks stunned and explains he thought the patroller was trying to rob him.

In the black townships that bear the heaviest crime burden the punishment for suspected criminals is far worse, with angry mobs known to beat or burn a person to death.

The recourse to violence reflects deep levels of frustration among South Africans over the state's failure to fulfill its basic duty to protect its citizens.

The tough-talking, Stetson-wearing, new National Police Commissioner Bheki Cele has called for a change in the law that bars police from "shooting to kill" if lives are not in danger. Police are being "handcuffed" by the law, Cele complains.

Analysts have expressed concern that expanding their license could result in more wrongful killings. The number of people killed by police in action or in custody rose to 779 in the 12 months to March 2008, a 12 per cent increase on the previous year.

"Everyone is fed up with crime and the audacity of criminals and the violence they use," Johan Burger, a retired former senior policeman and senior researcher in crime and justice at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria told the German Press Agency dpa.

But for Burger, the answer lies in dealing with deficiencies in the criminal justice system and the "huge, huge problems within our society", including high rates of inequality and urbanization.

In the meantime, as South Africa prepares for an estimated 400,000-plus foreign visitors at next year's football World Cup, the picture remains grim.

The Sunday Independent newspaper quoted a trauma counsellor as saying her client base had doubled in a month amid anecdotal reports of an increase in armed robberies.

The South African Police Services has reacted by delaying the release of highly-anticipated annual crime statistics by three months. (dpa)