Cape Town - Parliament's police portfolio committee will visit the northern areas of Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape on Monday following a recent surge in gang-related shooting incidents and violence, as well as calls from community members for a parliamentary intervention, the committee said.
The committee would focus on five matters during the one-day oversight visit - the anti-gang capacity of the South African Police Service (SAPS) in Port Elizabeth; the relationship between local communities and SAPS; the resource allocation of SAPS stations in areas where gang violence was prevalent; the functionality of community police forums and neighbourhood watches in the affected areas; and the effectiveness of specialised units of SAPS in the Eastern Cape - committee chairman Francois Beukman said on Sunday.
The committee believed that fully-fledged and well-resourced anti-gang units should be rolled out to all metropolitan areas in the country.
As part of the visit, the committee also invited the chairman of the Eastern Cape legislature's oversight committee Michael Peter and members' of the Eastern Cape provincial legislature to accompany the committee on the oversight visit.
During the visit, the committee would engage with SAPS provincial commissioner Lt-Gen Liziwe Ntshinga on efforts to deal with trio-crimes (house and business robberies, and hijackings) in the Eastern Cape. The committee would also receive briefings from the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (Hawks) and the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (Ipid).
Beukman said it was vital that local communities work closely with law enforcement agencies to deal with endemic violence and organised crime.