Cape Town - There is optimism in the different spheres of government after Police Minister Senzo Mchunu indicated that he will work with them to tackle the crime scourge in the Western Cape.
He said there had been positive discussions between his department, the Western Cape government and the City which would be finalised in the next few weeks. He pledged to engage communities with the negotiations.
Among the issues he intends to prioritise is the drug trafficking problem in the province. Mchunu said he would also work on providing police with the necessary capacity to perform their jobs.
Mchunu said: “When I assumed the position, there were different mechanisms in which crime was being fought in the Western Cape. The officers were hard at work and so was management and different units. There were the Metro police and CPF were involved. Their own experience has been that they made progress somewhere and no progress elsewhere.
“The assessment is that there needs to be intensification so we come at a time where there is a need to review some of our challenges overall and some of our mechanisms. What we have learned in the Western Cape and in Cape Town in particular as far as gangs and extortion are concerned, you need a comprehensive strategy involving as many partners as possible at all levels.
“Without this comprehensive strategy, where you don’t just focus on fighting crime on the streets but you look at the socio-economics situation in the areas affected, and say this issue could be a cause of a major contributor to what we are seeing.”
Mchunu emphasised that the isolated approach of working in silos would not be an effective strategy.
“We are at the department of the police nationally. The department of Community Safety, provincially, and Metro police and various structures that are anti-crime, have to take urgent and drastic steps to forge a common approach and align ourselves and streamline our operations. Such that we have volume, manpower, all the other aspects of crime fighting, trained solely in fighting crime in the Western Cape.
“We have begun discussions and we are hoping that in the next two to three weeks we will be able to finalise what we are discussing with the provincial government, with the Metro police, to achieve alignment. We have to quickly go to the community and we are not going to wait until we have finalised our discussions.”
Community Safety and Police Oversight MEC Anroux Marais said she was encouraged by the outcome of the meeting. “I have set it as one of my goals to improve the relationship with the national government in the interest of a safer province,” Marais said.
“The strong relationship between the province and City of Cape Town must be augmented by firm co-operation with the national government, because the only way to beat crime is if we work together. It is early days yet, but the signs are there that the adversarial relationship of the past may be behind us. If we can build on this, it will be good news for the people of the Western Cape.”
Safety and security Mayco member JP Smith said Mchunu indicated that the public did not distinguish between the City, the Western Cape government and national government in their search for solutions to crime and that he himself believed that the whole of “government” should be working together to fight crime.
“This was the first time ever a meeting has been called with our municipality, attended by the full political and secretariat leadership of SAPS and it turned out to be a very promising meeting,” said Smith.
“The City had an unfortunate and adversarial relationship with the previous national minister and I was hoping that the new minister would be the one that ‘flips the script’ and lets all of the local and provincial governments join hands with the national government to help win the fight against crime. That will be an extraordinary legacy.
“The progress made in discussions with the new minister left me with the hope that he could help remove the obstacles that would help turn the tide which would allow us to achieve reductions in crime in the next two years,” said Smith.
“He responded to many of the obstacles that seemed to frustrate our progress previously, with indications that these matters that could be resolved and as not being consequential. This would pave the way for a united front in combating the issue of gang violence and extortion.
“Our mayor repeated our previous offer, which was this time readily welcomed. We will ourselves as a municipality, provide any land and facilities we may have available for the purpose of additional police stations to serve many of the communities in dire need.
“Minister Senzo Mchunu agreed that the SAPS is under-resourced and needed urgent attention, but our offer comes with the condition that such new police stations need to be resourced with additional members and not by redeploying members from other police stations,” Smith said.
Mchunu said he would deal with dysfunctional police stations.
“We are going to have to deal with the police stations ourselves because from where we sit, there are pointers that some of the station are really dysfunctional or functioning at a low level. We’ve got to round this off parallel to what I’m talking about and upgrade and improve,” said Mchunu.
“We then have to come inside these police station and say do we have the personnel, capacity and skills to drastically improve on capacity to fight crime, other than just having human beings with guns.
“There is a lot that needs to be done on the side of technology and if we align with Cape Town and the province that process might move faster than when we work alone as national, due to resources. We want to be intelligence driven and in that regard we need to adjust and review our budget as it stands, but we are right at the end of the budget process.
“But when the opportunity arises to review we will certainly do so in October to align it with what we would have done then as the result of the need to intensify and improve our war on crime.
“Our take is that if our views find favour within communities and the partners, there is no chance that we will fail.”
Mchunu said they had found out drugs were sometimes the cause for shootings in the province.
“Most of the murders here - the pointer is drugs which means that they should be on our radar in terms of combating but also working very hard to check where these drugs come from and go exactly where they come from.”
Mchunu spoke about police corruption and that officers should choose which side they wanted to be on.
“We admit that there is police corruption throughout the country,” said Mchunu.
“Those who are corrupt in the police need to be told they chose the wrong career. That is not where they belong. You can’t be a police officer and a criminal at the same time. You have to jump the fence and go to the other side. We need to deal with them.”