Pretoria - Deputy Minister of Police Cassel Mathale has vowed to give more power to Community Policing Forums (CPF) across the country by providing them with “tools of the trade”.
Mathale is leading a three-day round-table discussion between SAPS management and more than 350 CPF members from 1156 police stations in all nine provinces in Sunnyside, Pretoria.
According to the police, the discussions that started yesterday are aimed at enhancing community participation in the fight against crime.
CPFs are structures consisting of ordinary community members who volunteer their time and expertise to assist police in making communities safer.
The role of the CPF is to, among others, make known the needs of the community to the police and assist the police to meet those needs.
They also hold the police to account by monitoring the service provided by the SAPS to stations in their local policing precinct.
The meeting also includes community patrollers, neighbourhood watch structures, and private security.
Speaking to the media yesterday, Mathale said the objective of the meeting was to devise and identify strategies as well as resources that are required to assist CPF structures improving relations and coordination between police stations and the communities they serve.
“This is to reflect on how best we can strengthen our communities through CPFs because it's a platform through which communities interface with the SAPS in our work to fight crime and ensure that South Africans live peacefully,” Mathale said.
He added that the SAPS has been in talks with the volunteers since 2018 and were only meeting now to reflect on how best they could strengthen working relations with the CPF.
“We are not only interfacing CPF for these three days.
“We have also invited other stakeholders that we work with, like the business against crime, traditional leaders and faith-based organisations that can contribute in strengthening our communities because communities are at the centre of the fight against crime,” he said.
Mathale further outlined that since the launch of the idea of the CPFs, discussions on how to equip the CPF members have been taking place.
“For these volunteers to do their work more efficiently, we need to provide them with the basic tools of trade, like the ability to communicate.
“For example, in other provinces, they use their own resources to do the volunteer work, so we thought that as the SAPS, we should also come to the party and give them some form of assistance.
“That will enable them to do their work efficiently and much better.”
Mathale said the police ministry had already identified the top 30 police stations nationally and top 20 stations in provinces that would benefit from this idea.
And they were looking at expanding the CPF network in order to cast a bigger net to catch criminals across the country.
“Criminals don't have borders, so therefore, it's important that we also operate like that. We must be ahead of them, and the only way to do so is to create platforms wherein experiences can be shared amongst CPFs across the country,” Mathale said.
CPF member Thabang Malope from Tembisa, who was outside the round-table venue, but not part of the meeting, said the discussions gave them confidence. He felt the government's support and that they were being taken seriously.
“For once, we feel confident that the government has finally taken us seriously. We do a very important job out there and without their support we are failing, so discussions like this help a lot to fight crime, especially if they are going to help us with equipment,” Malope said.
Pretoria News