Cape Town - The City of Cape Town is currently training 1 000 metro police candidates as part of “Project 1 000”, and yesterday, they demonstrated the skills they’ve acquired.
Western Cape Premier Alan Winde and Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis joined a mass training session for metro police and Leap learnership candidates, together with safety and security mayco member JP Smith, in Bellville.
Under Project 1 000, a metro police learnership programme, the City is training 1 000 new candidates as a means of growing municipal policing resources over time to help SAPS fight crime.
The training started in December following an extensive recruitment process.
Smith said traditionally, their training college had limited capacity, as before Leap, 120 people at most went through the college a year.
“What would frequently happen was that all kinds of projects would arise.
“The electricity department would say they need another 40 members, the rail enforcement unit (joint venture between the City and Prasa and the province) would pop up and ask for 120 members.
“There were special challenges which needed to be met.
“Our college could never get ahead, we were always struggling with these vacancies and right at the start of the mayor’s first term in office, he was able to leverage some funding and then opened that bottleneck and allowed us to appoint a significant number of additional staff, with over R30 million worth of investment made including training colleges.”
The trainees yesterday showed off their training in arresting suspects and conducting a stop and search demonstration that displayed their physically fitness.
“Project 1 000 builds on the Leap programme, which has already deployed 1 300 new boots on the ground in crime hotspots via a partnership between the City and Western Cape Government,” Smith said.
Winde said: “I was impressed to see both Leap and metro police candidates taking on their intense physical fitness training this morning. Over 28 000 arrests have been made by our Leap officers to date since the Province and City teamed-up in 2019 to invest in more policing resources. The impact our Leap officers are making in tackling crime would not be possible without the type of intensive training regime we see on display here this morning. The Western Cape Government commends the bravery of these recruits in choosing this line of work, and I wish them well.”
Mayor Hill-Lewis said they are putting R35 million behind Project 1 000 learnerships in the coming year.
“As we aim to keep growing our policing resources over time to help SAPS fight crime, our investments are showing promising results, particularly in helping SAPS to combat gang, gun, and drug crime.
“Overall, City policing operations confiscated 447 illegal firearms in the last two financial years.
“Firearm-related arrests went up 35% in 22/23, with law enforcement also doubling annual drug arrests from 4 000 to 8 000 over the same period.”
Cape Argus