PETITION FOR SAFER COMMUNITIES

The DA-led City of Cape Town and DA-led Western Cape Provincial Government do their best to help fight crime with local initiatives such as crime prevention, traffic and by-law enforcement as well as support for community policing interventions such as neighbourhood watches. 

The reality, though, is that local and provincial governments have no control over the South African Police Service (SAPS) or the rest of the criminal justice system which falls under the ANC-led national government. 

Government must act now!

We demand that national government:

1.  increase visible policing in all communities giving proper effect to sector policing,
2. deploy more competent and well-trained police officers to achieve a police deployment ratio of no less than one police officer for every 220 members of the public,
3. equip police stations properly with vehicles and resources, including reinstating effective mobile biometric profiling,
4. recruit more properly-trained detectives and reduce the detective case load to below 25 cases per detective,
5. restore the effective functioning of crime intelligence services and ensure prosecutorially-driven policing and investigations, and information sharing with other enforcement agencies,
6. adequately resource all departments involved with the criminal justice system (SAPS, NPA, DOJ and DCS) to achieve meaningful conviction rates, especially for gang-related and serious violent crime,
7. reinstate specialised units to deal with gangs and drug-related crimes and ensure that these are linked to multi-disciplinary teams of investigators and prosecutors, and
8. guarantee the safety and anonymity of those who report crimes.