The Cape Town police have admitted that areas with the highest crime rates have the lowest police coverage.
|||Cape Town - Thousands of Cape Town’s most vulnerable citizens are having to fend for themselves against rampant crime because of a dire shortage of police, the police themselves have admitted.
The national South African average for policing is one policeman for every 330 people.
But in many of Cape Town’s worst crime-ridden suburbs, there is just one policeman per 1 000 people, essentially leaving those residents three times as vulnerable, when they should be more closely protected. In Mitchells Plain the ratio is one to 3 200.
These figures have been officially obtained by Community Safety MEC Dan Plato from the SAPS Provincial Commissioner’s Office, and Plato is dismayed by the results.
The official statistics point to a police to population ratio of one police officer for every 245 citizens in the Western Cape - one of South Africa’s best ratios, only beaten by the Northern Cape with a ratio of 1:170.
Plato said: “This may look good on paper, however, in my numerous visits to police stations, I often experience a lack of police officers and my office receives many complaints of a lack of personnel resources.
“In April this year I wrote to the Provincial Commissioner’s Office to request the police to population ratios for every SAPS station in the province. The reply I received was most concerning.
“If one compares the 10 stations in the province that experience the highest number of murders… at the majority of these stations, each officer is instead serving at least five times more citizens than the provincial norm,” Plato reported.
“The 20 police stations with the worst police:population ratios are, without fail, the stations which are notorious for high levels of crime.
“This leads me to believe that the poor numbers of operational police officers at these stations has a negative impact on the crime levels in these areas and is something which needs to be addressed urgently,” Plato said.
Plato said he had on May 13, and again subsequently, requested an urgent response from the Provincial Police Commissioner on how he planned to remedy the situation at the Cape’s crime hot spots, and specifically address the critical lack of policemen. He had not had a response yet, he said. The matter had now been reported to the provincial Standing Committee on Community Safety, Cultural Affairs and Sport.
The Provincial Police Commissioner and his senior management would be asked to explain to the provincial parliament “why the police to population ratio has fallen to such disastrous levels”, he said.
The numbers of Police coverage:
* Nyanga: 233 murders (2011/12), 1 policeman per 1418 people
* Khayelitsha: 161 murders, 1 per 1675
* Harare: 154 murders, 1 per 1702
* Gugulethu: 120 murders, 1 per 1273
* Kraaifontein: 94 murders, 1 per 1630
* Delft: 87 murders, 1 per 1166
* Mfuleni: 67 murders, 1 per 1095
* Mitchell’s Plain: 66 murders, 1 per 3239
* Bishop Lavis: 54 murders, 1 per 1064
Cape Argus