Cape Town - Newly- appointed Western Cape police commissioner Thembisile Patekile has outlined detailed plans to address crime in the province, which include a focus on gangsterism and extortion.
During a digital news conference with Premier Alan Winde, Patekile, who has been promoted to the rank of lieutenant-general, said he would focus on eight identified police stations that report about 45% of contact crimes in the province.
He listed these as murder, GBV, armed robberies and carjackings and said police resources would be systematically deployed. The police would at the same time conduct social interventions with the communities in those areas.
“We will be focusing on firearms, because there are a lot of weapons in this province. We will take on the crime syndicates in a systematic and scientific approach and take them down.
“We are going to take the entire gang enterprise down, we’ve already started. If we take the top guys, we collapse the organisations. That’s the plan we have and we will carry it out in the next five months in tandem with the other crime prevention programmes.”
Patekile said he would also tackle social-economic crimes including land invasions, taxi violence, counterfeit goods and the burning of trucks as these all prevented the economy from thriving.
Introducing Patekile to Winde and Community Safety MEC Albert Fritz, Deputy National Commissioner (crime detection) Sindile Mfazi said Patekile was selected from among the best of a shortlist of six who made it to the final stages of the interviews for the job.
“He actually presented to us his plan for the intervention that he is bringing to the province in terms of stabilising the environment, and of course to bring normality.
“In his plan, he has identified areas that we will prioritise and his focus of policing is around those areas. We need to take our communities into our confidence as they are an integral part of our processes in terms of crime fighting.”
Winde said he was reassured to hear Patekile’s plan and thanked the police for having supported the provincial safety plan since its inception two years ago.
“I also want to echo Lieutenant-Gen Patekile’s call to members of the community to assist SAPS in their crime fighting efforts and to do so by coming forward and reporting any perpetrators of crime. We all have an important role to play in ridding our province of crime.”
Fritz assured Patekile of the provincial government’s full support in his assignment and said: “I can see the partnerships to make the citizens of this province safer. These are between the SAPS and the City, the traffic department, our neighbourhood watches and CPFs, security firms.
“Getting the safety plan off the ground will make our communities safer by dealing with gangsterism and violence in the metro,” said Fritz.
mwangi.githahu@inl.co.za