The recent wave of brutal crimes of murder and rape highlights SA’s crisis of policing, lawlessness and the need for the government to address this as an emergency.
In this column on Monday we called for an overhaul of the policing system to strengthen operations at police station level to be far more connected to the communities they serve. We also called for competent leadership at provincial and national levels to implement an effective crime prevention strategy.
On Monday, police management led by minister Bheki Cele and national commissioner Fannie Masemola did just that by announcing that police stations were bolstering their teams for the Friday to Monday shifts, when the highest crimes are reported. Masemola said the SAPS was enhancing policing methods to reduce serious and violent crime.
These will include intensified deployments of officers to identified crime hotspots. He said all provinces will now conduct simultaneous blitz operations, with high visibility and combat operations throughout weekends.
“These entail cordon and searches as well as intelligence-driven, multidisciplinary, disruptive operations,” he said. The measures to tackle crime come on the back of consecutive weekends of mass killings in taverns and horrific rapes of young girls in Krugersdorp.
While residents of West Village and other communities that have been terrorised by criminal gangs without police action may feel it's too little too late, we welcome having reached this point. There is still a long way to go for the police to regain the trust of communities like West Village, which have lived in constant fear and with self-imposed curfews while the police simply did nothing.
The problem in the area and parts of the West Rand has been ascribed to illegal mining activities undertaken by so-called zama-zamas or illegal foreign nationals – predominantly from Lesotho – who are heavily armed. The obvious question is what’s next, then?
Both Cele and Masemola have vowed to “push the zama-zama back” and deal with illegal mining operations in the West Rand and elsewhere.
Masemola said the police had established special task teams in provinces where there was illegal mining and there was co-operation with some mining houses (to close abandoned shafts where they operate).
This is definitely a start but let's not stop there. We must keep the ball rolling with communities to reduce violent crime and Sowetan offers its hand to help where possible.
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