Cape Town – The constant bickering over crime and policing between Police Minister Bheki Cele, the Western Cape government and the City has left a criminologist worried about the safety of the communities.
This stems from Cele’s visit to the province to meet with 78 commanders of several policing districts in the Cape Town metropole on Wednesday, following several crime incidents and mass shootings that took place over the past weekend on the Cape Flats, leaving more than 10 people dead.
A 26-year-old man linked to the shooting in Ravensmead in which three people were killed and one injured on Friday evening was arrested on Monday.
Police said they were still combing for clues in the Khayelitsha shooting in a shack in the PJS informal settlement on Saturday evening that left six people dead and one seriously injured.
Cele visited the Ravensmead, Khayelitsha and Gugulethu police stations to assess the operational response of the service points to crime incidents.
He said the purpose of the visits was to interact with the management of the stations and assess the crime levels in the policing precincts in an effort to find solutions to some of the problems facing policing in those areas.
He detailed a few of the problems facing the police, including gang violence, police clashing with the Sassa beneficiaries in Bellville, beach protests, and the breaking of Covid-19 regulations.
He said the mentality of the Western Cape government does give them problems when it comes to the crime situation.
“You can’t find the premier, knowing very well he is the part of the laws that we make, specifically with the Covid-19 regulations. He sits on the Presidential Co-ordinating Council (PCC) and argues," said Cele.
“You can't just go there and come back and call those regulations nonsensical, and encourage people to break the law, and say, ’yes we know that they are breaking the law, but the regulations that we agreed upon were so nonsensical’.”
Guy Lamb, a criminologist in Stellenbosch University’s political science department, said there had been tensions for a long time between the national police ministry and the Western Cape government, as well as the City, on the issue of policing.
Lamb said the bottom line was that, “we actually want to see improvements in safety in the Western Cape, specifically in Cape Town. There needs to be a good relationship between the ministry, Community Safety Department and the City’s Safety and Security directorate”.
However, he said the problem was the tension that existed between the leadership, and that didn’t help the safety matters.
Safety and security Mayco member JP Smith said the problem with Cele was that he wasn’t responding from a factual base, he made stuff up and believed in his own estimations. He said Cele’s attempts to link beach protests with gangsterism was “ludicrous nonsense”.
Premier Alan Winde’s spokesperson, Bianca Capazorio, said the premier did not want to get into a public spat with Cele “as politicising crime, which impacts so many of their residents’ lives, serves nobody”.
“We must however place on record that at no point has the premier encouraged lawlessness in this province. Premier Winde wrote to both the minister of health and to the president detailing his concerns about certain regulations and pointing out that the beach ban specifically was not based on science. He has also raised the same concerns in the PCC,” said Capazorio.
She said the Western Cape government had a good working relationship with the police in the province “who were working with them on rolling out the safety plan aimed at increasing law enforcement in crime hotspots, and introducing violence prevention programmes”.
“We are also working closely with them on the extortion committee because we understand the impact that crime and violence have on communities,” she said.
“We have maintained this focus while the minister has obsessed over beaches and used valuable resources that could have been used in the fight against crime in our communities.”
Cape Argus