Cape Town: Mitchells Plain residents are at their wits end over the lack of police services in the area.
Residents had a chance to engage with Police Minister Bheki Cele, who led a ministerial Imbizo in the community this morning.
According to the latest crime statistics, Mitchells Plain police station was listed in the majority of the top 30 serious crime categories.
Residents raised different issues, ranging from police being rude to them, not enough police vehicles to service the area and gangsterism and drugs.
Mitchell’s Plain Community Police Forum member, Norman Jantjies, said they are still under-resourced.
“We need more police vans. We need a gang unit and a focus on drugs because most murders are as a result of drugs,” said Jantjies.
He said another problem they were faced with that made crime escalate was the fact that safety structures in the community fight among each other, and that should stop.
Cele said the mandate of everyone who worked for the government was to make sure that people were safe, and for that to happen, everyone must work together.
He said they had a problem with crime in the Western Cape, Gauteng and KwaZulu Natal.
Cele said community policing is legislated, and if Neighbourhood Watches got stipends, every safety structure should get stipends.
He thanked the efforts from community policing and agreed that the government is not doing enough to help.
He said KZN and the Western Cape consumed the most money when it came to policing.
“Since 2018, we have put more police in the Western Cape and R350 million on those operations,” he said.
He said this is the first province to have an Anti Gang Unit.
Cele said they last trained police in 2019 because of Covid-19, and those were 5 000 members, of which, about 1 200 came to the province.
“We’ll put more effort so that people of the Western Cape don’t feel different from the rest of the country,” added Cele.
Weekend Argus