Police to focus on province
THE Western Cape would be a particular focus for new national police commissioner Khehla Sitole, he said yesterday at a media briefing in Bishop Lavis.
Sitole outlined the police turnaround vision and strategy.
He said the police had designed a modus operandi counter-strategy intended to prevent criminal syndicates from executing their unlawful acts by profiling the masterminds.
“We have formally designed the gang combating strategy, which will focus on gangs’ activities. We want to clear out corruption because some of these strategic criminals are trying to corrupt our police,” said Sitole.
Resources would be migrated from the top to the bottom to allow experienced police officers and detectives to work at police stations, he said.
A number of problematic police stations in the province with “crime weight” would benefit from this new structure. One of these was Nyanga.
“The weight of these police stations has outgrown the profile of those police stations. We will see resources flocking from the national level to the lower level. They will not come at once to all the police stations but they will gradually come. We will start by empowering what we call sector policing. and in sector policing we bring contact points.” Sitole said there was “an ongoing engagement” between himself and the SANDF to deploy the army as part of Operation Fiela.
“The defence force will be part of Operation Fiela in the Western Cape, but the deployment will be done subject to the operational arrangements between the police and the defence force, where logistics will be discussed.”
With gang violence spiralling out of control, there has been an anxious wait for the army to be sent in.