Vehicles visiting Signal Hill at night will soon be closely monitored by SANParks rangers in an urgent bid to prevent violent crime.
|||Cape Town - Vehicles visiting Signal Hill at night will soon be closely monitored by SANParks rangers in an urgent bid to prevent violent crime at the famous view sites.
This was one of several proposals decided on at a meeting yesterday by representatives of SANParks, the City of Cape Town, the police, the Cape Town Central and Camps Bay community police forums (CPFs), Cape Town Tourism and the Oranjekloof Central Improvement District - meeting under the banner of the Table Mountain Safety Forum.
They resolved that SANParks will apply to the city to put access control in place at Signal Hill and Tafelberg roads from 10pm to 5am.
Rangers will record all vehicles’ details. In addition, the CCTV camera at the Signal Hill parking area will be refurbished to increase coverage and improve the clarity of its images.
Efforts will also be made to improve lighting at several parts of the site.
The Cape Town Central CPF would investigate the possibility of installing cameras with numberplate recognition abilities at the entry and exit points to automatically identify suspicious vehicles on the city’s databases.
The city’s mayoral council member for safety and security, JP Smith, questioned how to increase patrols at all of the view sites, or whether some should be closed during certain hours.
Smith said locals knew that parking at remote view sites late at night was inadvisable, but ways needed to be found to communicate this information to out-of-town and foreign visitors.
In early 2011, following a spate of attacks on the mountain, the Table Mountain Safety Forum was set up.
It reported earlier this year that, between 2011 and 2012, the number of crimes against mountain users had dropped by 50 percent. It said that in the City Bowl and Camps Bay where it was active there had not been a single reported incident between October 2011 and January this year.
It said there had been three incidents of robbery and attempted robbery in January and February and it had immediately responded “by increasing its activity with SANParks rangers, police officers on horseback and on vehicle patrol, neighbourhood watch patrols and through aerial surveillance, as well as through the eyes and ears of bikers, hikers and walkers”.
Cape Argus