Today, I joined the DA’s Federal Leaders, Mmusi Maimane, Team One SA Spokesperson on Crime, John Steenhuisen, and DAWN Leader Nomafrench Mbombo in Kleinvlei to launch our national police week campaign. The DA is the only party with a plan to make our communities safer.
1 226 people died in four months in the Western Cape. The ANC is failing at policing, something which the national Minister of Police, Bheki Cele, has admitted to – that the ANC government has dropped the ball on crime.
The families of 1 226 people have had to suffer the pain of losing a loved one – no amount of crime summits will ever make up for this.
We are facing a crime emergency here, but the ANC national government won’t do anything about it. Instead of sending the Western Cape SAPS the resources needed to keep people safe, they deliberately under resource our province.
The national average has one police officer keeping 375 people safe, but in the Western Cape, one officer must handle 509 people. That’s a shocking difference when we have been begging for the resources to fight gang- and drug-related violence.
In Kleinvlei – the SAPS station with the third highest number of sexual assaults in the whole country – the ratio is even worse: for every 530 residents, there is only one police officer. When I meet the parents who have lost children to gang violence here, as I did today, I can’t imagine how the ANC justifies having so few officers in our communities to himself.
The DA has stepped in where we can to help, despite SAPS being controlled by the national government. We even offered R5 million to the national government to put police reservists in Western Cape police stations to help, but Minister Cele didn’t take up this offer. This is cold comfort for the families of the 1226 murder victims. Through our oversight role, we identified over 250 cases in the last quarter that were struck off the court roll because investigations were incomplete or dockets were not at court.
As long as the national government controls policing from Pretoria, we have will have a one-size-fits-all failing police service. This is why we will fight for the Western Cape to have a professional, modern and honest provincial police service that is responsive to communities’ needs and to keep the Western Cape safe. The protection of our province must be in the hands of our people – not the corrupt cadres of Luthuli House.
We will continue to make progress by establishing more municipal police services, and give them along with our traffic police a greater role in protecting our residents. And we will establish coastal patrol units in all our coastal municipalities, to repeat the successes of the City of Cape Town’s Marine and Environmental Law Enforcement Unit and stop the flow of drugs and poached resources that fuel gangs.
The ANC government is getting away with murder, because their policing failures are costing the lives of our people. The DA has a plan to fight crime and keep people safe in the Western Cape, and we will fight for a safer province for all residents.