CAPE TOWN - The police are addressing money laundering as part and parcel of unconventional policing approach, as it has come to light that the cash-in-transit heists monies are involved in laundering, South African national police commissioner General Khehla John Sitole told members of Parliament (MPs) on Wednesday.
“This money is involved in laundering and we addressing money laundering as part and parcel of unconventional policing approach, which I would not disclose,” Sitole said while briefing Parliament's portfolio committee on police.
This follows after the increase in violent cash-in-transit heists which have rocked the country in recent weeks.
He said he had previously informed the committee that one of the new strategies that have been brought to the fore was illicit economy combating strategy.
“There is quite a lot of link of these monies to the illicit economy and that particular response is gonna be talking to exactly where this money is going."
He stated that one of the areas that had come to the fore was that there was an actual planned or targeted attacks to the grand economic strategies of the different countries, but the modus operandi affects all the countries including South Africa.
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“The criminal value chain and syndicates are almost common, so the strategy that we gonna be coming up with is a strategy that will talk to a collective regional response towards this," he said.
“Police have learned that policing takes place at the grassroots level and that is where crime is also taking place and that’s where police need maximum resources of policing.”
Khehla said the first thing that the police have done, running concurrently with the stabilisation was the migration of resources down to grass root level, adding that at the end of the stabilisation, the normalisation must sustain the momentum by talking to the strategic deployment of resources so that process runs concurrently.
“But we are also running it together with unions, then we also, at the partnership level and also at operational level started the design of the cash movement strategy. From the discussions here, I think there is a willingness amongst all the parties to share one common vision and to fight the same common enemy but we didn’t have a strategic intervention.”