Africa-Press – South-Africa. We cannot fulfil our mandate because our police station is under-resourced.”
This is the claim of former executive members of the Simon’s Town Community Policing Forum (CPF), who said they had no option but to resign.
They say they are fed up with the lack of patrols in the area and the chronic staff shortages in the precinct.
CPF members said that, despite numerous requests for police intervention to address staff shortages at the Simon’s Town police station, their calls have fallen on deaf ears.
The CPF’s former chairperson, Eileen Heywood, said the decision to leave the forum was difficult but necessary.
The Simon’s Town precinct stretches from Glencairn through Simon’s Town to Cape Point, and also includes Misty Cliffs, Scarborough and Red Hill.
Heywood said:
She said the decision to leave had left her “devastated and sad”, as the work she and her team have put in over the past five years had all been fruitless.
The CPF said a unanimous decision was taken towards the end of last year for all 10 members to resign, with immediate effect, after seeing an increase in crime-related incidents, and where police again did not have enough staff members to send out to patrol or respond to crime-related incidents.
“It is extremely sad that this had to be our final decision. I have failed our community and my team because there is literally nothing else I can do without the help of the police. They are our backbone and, without police, we cannot fulfil our mandate.
Heywood added:
She said their mandate was always to ensure that police met the community policing needs.
The status quo had become untenable and the only way to regain the community’s trust would be to get the police structure right.
Police spokesperson Brigadier Athlenda Mathe said National Police Commissioner General Fannie Masemola had directed the divisional commissioner of visible policing to look urgently at the concerns raised and to find ways to address them.
Mathe acknowledged the crucial and pivotal role that CPF members played in assisting the mandate of the SAPS.
“Communities, through their local CPF, remain the eyes and ears of communities,” Mathe said, adding that since his appointment as commissioner, Masemola had prioritised the rejuvenation of CPF structures.
“Part of his immediate priorities was to ensure that these structures are functional and are well-resourced,” Mathe said.
According to Mathe, part of the commissioner’s priorities remains resourcing and capacitating police stations throughout the country.
With the deployment of 10 000 police officers, more than 1 100 will be deployed to police stations that need personnel in the Western Cape.
“Provincial commissioners … know the needs of their stations. The number of members per station is operational information that we are not at liberty to discuss in the media space as this poses a risk to safety and security matters,” Mathe said.
Heywood said there was currently no CPF in the area but there would possibly be a new forum formulated by the end of February.
CPF Southern Cluster executive member, Jonathan Mills, said the CPF was an integral part of community policing in South Africa and had a constitutional mandate to uphold.
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“When an entire CPF made up of committed and experienced community volunteers resigns all at once because they believe their local police service isn’t working properly and the system in place to address those failures isn’t working either, then we, as fellow CPF members and even as private citizens, should be looking at it very closely,” Mills said.
He said that while he was “pleased” that the national commissioner was calling for the concerns to be looked into urgently, it would be a “test of how seriously” the commissioner views the role of the CPF as to whether this matter was “swiftly resolved or not”.
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