OPINION: Fed up with all crime incidents

M Dube of Blairgowrie writes:

I am simply so fed up to an extent that I don’t know what else to do.

I have been a victim of crime so many times it would sound like a fiction novel.

The latest was on Thursday [11 June] when at about 11am I heard someone knocking at the door, but I was not expecting any one.

My friend whom I live with also heard the knock and like me did not attend to it immediately.

I was in my bedroom and he was somewhere between the bathroom and the kitchen tidying up.

We were both about to get ready to leave for work at 12pm, we don’t work at the same place, but our shifts were almost the same for the week.

The knocking persisted for another minute or so and then stopped.

My friend then went to the door to check who was knocking.

Upon opening the door he saw two males and one of them suddenly pepper-sprayed him.

He ran back down the corridor shouted my name and explained that he had been pepper-sprayed. It took me a few minutes to understand what was happening and when I got to the door I was already choking from the pepper spray.

They disappeared in a flash.

They had already broken the burglar gate with seemingly a crowbar.

I went back inside to check on my friend who was in serious pain from the pepper spray.

I looked down from the balcony and I saw a lady who gestured that people ran past her in a certain direction.

I turned around and my friend was on the phone talking to someone. It turned out he was talking to the owner of the take-away

shop downstairs asking him to phone the police.

He did and the police came promptly but the assailants were gone, disappeared so quickly like thin ice on a summer hot day.

There was nothing the police could do and besides nothing had been taken. l looked at my friend still muttering and deeply in pain and

thought to myself, this isn’t right, how could they just getting away like that, but they sure did.

They probably went on to pounce on someone somewhere else, who knows?

All I know is that they disrupted our lives and got away with it. This is my real worry, I have been a victim of crime more than fifteen times between 1999 and 2015.

Just three months ago I lost a car. Between three police stations ( Linden, Randburg and Morningside ) I have reported more than ten crimes where I was a victim but only one of them had a conviction. I am talking about serious to petty crimes.

What does one have to do?

Just don’t know.

Editor’s note: Letter published unedited.