Plea for mayor to curb Long Street criminality

Photo: Skyler Reid

Photo: Skyler Reid

Published Feb 5, 2017

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Dear Mayor De Lille,

Mayor Giuliani is credited with having tamed the criminality and excesses of New York. I wonder whether you can do the same for our city of Cape Town?

I bought a flat at the top of Long Street 20 years ago.

It used to be a pleasure and a privilege to live in a beautiful old building on a street full of character by day, yet empty and quiet at night.

Now, when I complain to friends about the noise, menace and madness that reigns in my road after dark, they all say: “But it’s Long Street. What do you expect?” And I get irritated. It does not have to be so. It used not to be.

When I walk from parking my car to the flat, I am assaulted by the racket coming from countless bars and clubs that spew music from wide-open windows and sport live bands on open terraces. During this short trip from car to flat every night, individuals offer me drugs; drunks and revellers shout, laugh and scream; others party on the pavement beside their parked cars, their music adding to all the rest from their car stereo.

This al fresco party each night has no restrictions: people buy food from street vendors cooking on portable grills; they get their drugs from touts; they urinate (and more) in the gutter and they often fight. Taxis cruise slowly by like pimps on the lookout, blocking the traffic in both lanes, thus forcing cars to hoot in frustration and anger and adding to the noise and chaos.

My block of flats is just 100 metres from these bars and clubs. Hotels and guest houses in the vicinity also complain vehemently about the noise, they cannot let rooms overlooking Long Street. How could anyone sleep with such a racket so close?

Yet… if I speak to anyone in authority, which over the years I have done regularly, they all claim that it is impossible to do anything about it.

I am told there are too few officers available to patrol. And those that do patrol cannot distinguish, for reasons hard to comprehend, which of the bars is breaking which of the by-laws.

The fact that each one is spewing ear-drum bursting music would appear sufficient proof that they are breaking the law: but apparently not to officers who monitor the law. Often I have been told, a bar won't have a licence for open-air music; often it will have no licence for live or recorded music. Often, even, it will have no licence to sell liquor.

Yet it will continue to do these things unimpeded. The bars and clubs continue to multiply and thus augment the increasingly frantic night economy and encourage Long Street’s ever-growing appetite for drink, drugs and deafening music.

I begin to wonder whether there might be a protection racket in place, a Cape Town-type Mafia, that permits this activity?

Or is it simply the economy – that cash rules? Booze and drug dealing bring money to a cash-strapped city.

I see police officers patrolling, yet ignoring premises where the music is so loud you cannot hear yourself think.

Why don’t they go in and stop it? What is so complicated about that? And don’t they see the drug pedlars on every street corner?

Long Street is now a no-go area for me and my friends at night and for anyone who is sensitive to noisy, wild behaviour.

Such a proud and extraordinary country, such a beautiful and sophisticated city, where so much has been achieved in the last 20 years, should not encourage this dystopian excess.

I don’t want to stop all the fun. Just please insist that bars install sound-proofing. Make them keep their doors and windows shut. And if they don’t fine them. Or shut them down.

It’s easy.

It’s what other cities in other countries do.

And stop the blatant drug dealing. If I can spot a dealer a mile away, surely the experts can.

It's a disappointment to me, a fan and supporter of South Africa, that law officers, and those that manage them, are either unwilling or incapable of stamping out what is so blatantly illegal and disruptive.

Are you, Mayor De Lille, ready to rise to the challenge and provide your officers with the means to civilise and control Long Street and insist its businesses follow the code of law?

I sincerely hope so.

Yours sincerely

Piers Allen

Long Street, Cape Town

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