Gauteng Premier Paul Mashatile launched a new crime-fighting strategy in Johannesburg yesterday. The Gauteng Aggravated Robbery Strategy (GARS) is based on four pillars - to improve the quality of policing, mobilise the community, prevent crime, and ensure an effective criminal justice system.
The first phase of the strategy will see surveillance cameras being placed in areas with a high crime rate.
The cameras, funded by the banking sector, cost a total of R14-million and will be installed within the next three months.
Some of the areas set to benefit from this CCTV network include Queenswood and Hatfield (Pretoria), Ivory Park and Boksburg (Ekurhuleni), Parktown and Bruma (Johannesburg), Diepkloof (Soweto) and Midrand.
The high-tech camera system will contain facial-recognition technology. The information from this system will be linked to the province’s crime management centre, where the police can compile profiles and images of Gauteng’s most-wanted criminals.
A control and operations room, directly linked to the Gauteng 10111 flying squad centre, will also be established in order to monitor these camera images and deploy police where necessary.
Cutting response times
The national standard for police response time is around 20 minutes. The Johannesburg metro police already claim a 10 minute response time, due in part to their surveillance initiatives in the Johannesburg CBD. They use 216 cameras in the city centre to combat crime on a minute to minute basis. “The impact of this system has been a huge reduction in crime around the CBD,” said Wayne Minaar, spokesperson for the Johannesburg Metro Police.
In addition to the surveillance system, 80 new vehicles will be made available by February next year, and in Ekurhuleni 500 new vehicles will be deployed. Mashatile said the goal of the rapid response teams’ fleet of cars and helicopters is to effectively halve the response times of the police and flying squads.
Other developments include
- South African Police Service mobile units in Diepsloot, Bramfischerville and Zandspruit will be deployed by February 2009.
- The number of police patrolling areas will also increase across the province from 3 000 to 10 000 by March next year.
- An anti-truck hijacking unit will also be deployed on all national and provincial roads within the province.
Police in Gauteng have already set up 21 special investigative detective teams focusing exclusively on tracing suspects in car hijackings, and house and business robberies.
''We are appealing to communities to support this initiative, by doing this we are giving practical meaning to a crime-free Gauteng," Mashatile said.
Institute for Security Studies report on crime
Yesterday The Institute for Security Studies (ISS) released a report announcing that the Government's National Crime Prevention Strategy (NCPS) has been, in part, unsuccessful until now due to a lack of focus on the socio-economic factors contributing to crime.
Johan Burger, senior researcher at the ISS, commented that the NCPS had set social conditions around crime as long term goals, which have not yet been implemented correctly.
“Socio-economic issues require patience and resources in order to be addressed properly,” said Berger. However Burger believes that the police have been very proactive in implementing short term operational goals.
Commenting on the new GARS approach Burger said, “We need things like this, such programmes address short term issues and we need to keep them up, they are important and necessary… The solution lies with both, in an integrated approach.”
Sapa & SAGN
