Community and police strategise against crime
The meeting was to give an opportunity to share their concerns, ideas, and initiatives with the police.
The Douglasdale CPF had a public meeting with the community at the Indaba Hotel Conference Centre to tackle issues pertaining to crime in Fourways and the surrounding areas.
The meeting was attended by various stakeholders including the police, JMPD and ward councillors on Wednesday, August 2 and no topic was off-limits: from cable theft, illegal early childhood development centres, undocumented immigrants, business and house robberies and gender-based-violence amongst many others.
Before the residents could start raising their concerns and offer possible solutions to crime in the area, the police and JMPD took the stand and addressed some of the issues that make their jobs difficult.
JMPD pleaded with residents to stop supporting the young men who take control of the traffic at intersections during load-shedding because it is not safe.
“Please stop promoting it. These young men are not trained for such responsibilities and it is dangerous. I had an encounter with one of them and asked why he does it and he said, ‘because I make money from it’. So, if you do not give them money, they won’t find a reason to do it. We understand it is hard during load-shedding but we are working on being in touch with Eskom about the schedules of different areas so that we can deploy our members to those locations like we usually do.”
Another issue that bothered the JMPD was not following the by-laws, “Please stop supporting illegal street hawkers and report such incidences to the police. If you keep on supporting their businesses it becomes difficult for us because after we leave, they come back.”
When it was time for residents to also get issues off their chest, Dakalo Mukwevho said he understood the purpose of the meeting, but he needed to see an action plan of all the suggested solutions.
“We need to know what is going to happen afterwards because we have already identified that most of the issues come from the informal settlement, Kya Sands. This should also be presented to the community especially those who could not attend the meeting because they cannot be ambushed with it.”
Keorapetse Masina said they do report crimes, but the police do not pitch in most cases. “I am part of a patrolling group in the area and we do not see a lot of visibility of our policeman in the area. Another theme of the meeting that we keep on hearing is that ‘the community needs to assist’. We have had incidents where we called the cops but not a single van came through.
“You are not going to get the community to assist you if we are not confident that when we make that emergency call then the police will come and back us up. It is a mission to get people to speak up against these issues if they do not have trust that they will get back up from the police.”
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