Cape Town mayor, Geordin Hill-Lewis, has written a formal request to Minister Bheki Cele to fulfill his democratic mandate by giving the City more policing power and its own fully fledged police force.
“Let me be clear about what we want: we want our own, fully-fledged City police force, with all the powers it needs to drastically reduce crime in Cape Town. And, if the minister is not prepared to give us the powers we seek, we will fight tooth and nail to get it. We owe it to the millions of people in this City, who live in fear of crime,” Hill-Lewis said in his council meeting address on Thursday.
As reported IOL, Cape Town faces a dire situation riddled with chronic under-resourcing, woeful conviction rates, and police leadership failures.
According to Hill-Lewis, a recent study found that 48% of SAPS detectives in the Western Cape have a caseload of over 200 dockets per officer.
“This is 333% above the norm. This problem is compounded by the current shortage of more than 500 SAPS detectives in the province,” he said.
He said that plans are already underway for the coming weeks to build the City’s municipal police into a “proper crime-fighting force”, developing the policing power – through technology, deployments, and more boots on the ground – to make Cape Town safer, reports Business Tech.
Plans that will be put in place over the next few months include:
- Training and deploying over 100 additional law enforcement officers into high-crime areas;
- Expanding neighbourhood watches and Highway patrols,
- Fully harnessing technology into a fully integrated Joint Services Operations Centre (JSOC) to fight crime, and
- Fighting to expand municipal policing powers.
Hill-Lewis commented that Cele previously refused the request, saying that he “cannot devolve power in the absence of a constitutional amendment”.
“This is nonsense. Section 99 of the Constitution provides that ‘a Cabinet member may assign any power or function…to a Municipal Council’. Accordingly, I have written to the minister to request that he uses his constitutionally-enshrined power to give us the policing powers we need,” Hill-Lewis responded.
“If Mr. Cele will not fulfill his democratic mandate to make the people of Cape Town safer, then we certainly will.”
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