In response to Mayor Dan Plato's opinion piece, “Police resources, good detective work, and solid prosecutions are what we need”.
by Mesuli Kama
On Friday, March 5, a group of ANC activists and other leaders visited families of victims murdered in a gang drive-by shooting in Mitchells Plain. During the visit to the bereaved families, we were shown visuals of innocent children in pools of blood.
Having seen such images, I have to fully agree with Mr Rozario Brown that we have a crisis of gangs that are terrorising communities in the Western Cape and that not enough is being done to guarantee the safety of our people.
The feeling that communities are on their own and cannot depend on the government to provide them with safety and security is justified, especially given the fact that the Western Cape contributes a significant number to South Africa’s murder rate.
The majority of Cape Flats police stations are in the top 30 murder precincts every year.
To address the persistent scourge of gangsterism, Mr Brown asks that the three spheres of government make people’s safety a priority by, among others, availing more funds for safety projects and infrastructure. He is also calling for more police resources and visibility in the crime hot spots, as well as more meaningful community involvement in the fight against crime.
Mr Brown’s demands are intertwined with ANC values and resolutions. For instance, to strengthen community participation in the fight against crime. There is an urgent need for a widespread community mobilisation programme to establish street, block and village committees which would work closely with police and other government institutions to rid the Cape Flats of gangs and drugs. It is time members of the communities take back the streets from the gangs.
There is also an urgent need to review our systems of allocating our scarce police resources to address unequal distribution.
I believe it is prudent that we start using the murder rate as a key determinant of deployment of police resources. We need to start deploying more police resources to the murder hot spots, and not in the affluent areas.
Dan Plato, the former MEC of Community Safety and now Cape Town mayor, proved Mr Brown’s claims correct that DA politicians simply do not care about the plight of the Cape Flats people. In his op-ed, “Police resources, good detective work, and solid prosecutions are what we need” in the Cape Argus of March 9, he exposed the DA’s hypocrisy, deceptions and uselessness. This is the exact same reason which prompted Mr Brown to call on communities to punish such politicians at the polls.
While the mayor argues that his government invested millions in ShotSpotter technology, reality shows that there has been no value for money in that investment. The ShotSpotter technology was used in the city between 2016 and 2019, when the contract expired. In all, there have been only 67 arrests as a direct result of the use of this technology, at a cost of R31.8 million.
It is clear that there is no value for money in this technology and that the government should invest resources in more effective tools such as more CCTV coverage in the Cape Flats. When the five children were shot in Mitchells Plain, the police relied on CCTV footage in people’s homes to conduct their investigation. The challenge of shortages of CCTV cameras in the crime hot spots is real.
No amount of spin can change that. Mayor Plato must be basing his argument on CCTV cameras in government buildings and the CBD, as there is a serious shortage of these in the poor, working-class communities.
No value for money in government investments in the fight against crime is also the reason for widespread criticism of the Safety Plan, as it is silent on addressing the root causes of crime. The biggest misstep of the Safety Plan is the lack of prioritisation of addressing the historical and structural challenges that give rise to violent crimes in the hot spot areas.
It is not by mistake that the crime hot spot areas are all in the working-class communities, where there is high poverty, unemployment and inequality. These are densely populated communities with poor lighting, poor accessibility and a lack of CCTV cameras. All these are responsibilities of the City and the provincial government.
Moreover, when the premier announced a Safety Plan, he said R1 billion would be spent to recruit and train 3 000 Law Enforcement Officers. Not only has the DA administrations both in the City and provincial government cut the number down to 1 000, but they have also missed planned targets for recruitment, training, and deployment of these officers.
Only 500 officers have been deployed to date. The additional 500 who were supposed to be deployed last year have yet to receive training. People are owed an explanation for this.
If there is anything to deduce from the opinion piece of mayor Plato, it is that he is heartless, uncaring and unsympathetic to the plight of the poor. He is an enemy of the poor and marginalised. Lest we forget, he is the same mayor who went to Nyanga and blamed children for playing near the bridge which collapsed and killed three children.
[“City of Cape Town and Western Cape have taken steps to curb rampant crime“ by MPL Reagen Allen is written in response to the above article.]
* Mesuli Kama is a ANC MPL.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.
Cape Argus
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