-Cele vows heads will roll
‘We dropped the ball’ minister admits after report shows steep spike
Tuesday’s shocking crime statistics were a product of the police “dropping the ball”‚ admitted Police Minister Bheki Cele.
He fell just short of placing the blame for the cutback of 10‚000 police officers at the feet of his predecessors‚ including Fikile Mbalula‚ whom he referred to as “honourable minister razzmatazz”‚ but it was clear that the 2017-2018 book year was disastrous for the service and for society.
“We have lost the United Nations norm of policing which says one policeman to 220 citizens. One police officer is now looking at almost double that‚” said Cele.
Cele revealed that SA had 200‚000 police in 2010‚ but now it stood at 191‚000. “We are 10‚000 police down‚ which means we do have a problem.”
Murders in SA were up to an all-time high of 20‚336 people‚ 1‚320 more than the previous year.
Cele vowed to place the heads of his crack team of police bosses “on the chopping block” to ensure that police efforts in the next year yielded results.
For a start he had already called together the security cluster for regular meetings after he shockingly revealed that they hadn’t been meeting for two years.
He also said that despite what the public might think about VIP protection they‚ like other units in the police‚ were struggling with resources.
“Ministers phone me everyday saying their houses are not guarded. They phone me everyday! Last year the VIP members were working overtime‚ we couldn’t pay them.
He addressed sexual violence against women by saying that the police’s inadequate response to these crimes came down to training.
“I just imagine what does a raped woman say to a male police officer about what happened to her. She gets there and the male officer says: ‘What happened?’.”
“I have a wife and wonderful kids but I don’t think I will ever be raped‚ so I can’t talk for the victims. But we have dropped the ball on them‚” he said.
His new handpicked directorate of priority crimes head‚ Advocate Godfrey Lebeya‚ said they were in the process of rebuilding their capacity to fight corruption in the state.
Lebeya said that members of the Hawks would have to be without reproach if they wanted to be effective at combating corruption and organised crime. Cele was more open about the corruption in government and referred to specific examples like 5‚000 housing units which existed on the computer systems of a municipality in Limpopo but which were never built.
He referred to another case in KwaZulu-Natal where a road was registered under a municipality and was supposed to have been built.
“I asked them to take me there. There was no road. To this day not a single tractor has driven on that road!”
When asked about what the police were doing about the spate of brazen cash-in-transit robberies, he again gave the media a glimpse of the decay that he had inherited in the security cluster.
“We have pooled together all our resources from different clusters. I don’t know why this wasn’t done before. We now have coordination between the different units‚” he said.
He also attributed much of the success which had led to the arrests of 50 high-profile cashin-transit heist suspects to a renewed crime intelligence capacity. He also addressed gangsterism in Cape Town saying it seemed to be a generational issue which affected a certain demographic group and that gang members were becoming younger and younger.
The highest single incident of murder which had resulted in the killing of 11 people in less than 30 minutes was attributed to an incident in Marikina informal settlement in Cape Town where gangsters had walked from door to door executing community members as reprisals for mob justice attacks against their fellow members.
Cele said that the problem in the Western Cape could not be resolved by deploying the army. He said that environmental design was a root cause of many policing problems and they were soon going to start programmes to get mass community cooperation to tackle gangsterism. — DDC