Cape Town – "The leadership within our country and communities have abandoned ship and left our communities to be run by gangs and criminals.
"The amount of families that have lost their loved ones through these violent acts of crime is an irreversible tragedy," says Pastor Charles George, chairperson of the Delft Community Policing Forum (CPF).
Delft recorded the highest murder rate at the weekend (five deaths) in the Cape metro region. Two more people were killed yesterday, including a taxi driver ferrying schoolchildren, who was shot, killed and robbed, George told the Cape Times on Tuesday.
Contributing to the community's frustration is the fact that the "Delft SAPS phones have been down since Friday afternoon with technical problems (Telkom)", said George. "Then they ask us to call 10111, which is dropping 45% of its calls."
One of the three Delft police station lines the Cape Times phoned on Tuesday was working.
"We have a facility in Delft where we can be the filter for government, where we can filter all these emergency calls, but they are not willing to come and partner with us," George said.
This is why the pro-active Delft CPF is hosting a crime summit together with the SAPS and all provincial government departments on Wednesday.
"Everyone has had enough of this criminal atmosphere and the one holding the purse strings to assist people to unlock the much-needed solutions has so much red tape wrapped around procedures and systems that this atmosphere will not be changed soon.
"We can't go on like this. We don't have one CCTV camera installed in Delft that is linked to the control room of the City of Cape Town.
"The reasons why they can't put up CCTV cameras is because they claim there is no infrastructure, which is a lie. We have fibre to our building, we have 23 sites at all the schools where can get air fibre to get the CCTV and cameras active.
"If they will supply us with the fibre and the stipends for the young people, we can get jobs for 500 people, but these guys are coming with the red tape and not listening to the solutions the community is putting on the table.
"All JP Smith does is hold a lot of talk shops. Who is responsible for these deaths?
"The government (local and provincial) is sitting with budgets they are returning to Treasury at the expense of the people.
"We need to call them out and say, hey guys, we have spoken to you long enough and put a proposal together about what we call smart townships.
"Where we are asking human settlements to fund recipients to build their own houses. We know how to do it.
"We did a whole presentation to human settlements at the Convention Centre. They loved it and then they come with all their red tape.
"We did a pilot with drones in Delft and now we are waiting for aviation to give approval. It's all red tape.
"When is the City going to launch its drones? When another 400 people get killed. These guys aren't serious about fighting crime and the communities are fed-up.
"In our metrople, just under 8 000 kids are not attending school. So our education department is failing, our health department is failing, our law enforcement.
"Who do we hold accountable? People get arrested today, they get charged, they get bail, so the justice system is failing our people.
"The person who gets bail comes back and kills two other people. Police are using people for target practice, shooting innocent people.
"People have the right to protest, they have the right to voice their concerns and frustrations, and when they get to the police station, they get told they can't make a case. They get threatened, they get bribed."