All-women team uses data to stop sea and land poachers
An operations centre in Cape Town collects and collates information from a range of channels to prevent syndicates from committing environmental crimes and to catch criminals in the act
Daily Maverick ventured inside the operations centre of the Table Mountain National Park, where an all-women team is laying the groundwork for special operations targeting environmental crimes such as abalone poaching, bark stripping and flower poaching, as well as crimes against visitors.
The all-women team specialises in data-driven operations, using information collected across a range of channels and turning it into interventions in environmental and contact crimes by poaching syndicates.
Jaclyn Smith, manager of the Sea, Air and Mountain (SEAM) operations unit, said: “The unit consists of two components. One is our operations room – our information and communications hub for data that comes in across the landscape from technology, people, social media, shared information groups with security cluster partners like the City of Cape Town, South African Police Service and metro police, as well as unofficial channels like neighbourhood watches and the other partners around the park.
“The second component is the operators, who are our conservation soldiers. They are specially trained to deal with target-driven operations and take the information collected by the operations room and turn it into actionable plans.”
Smith manages the operations team along with Ayesha Davids, the operations room control officer, who coordinates all activities relating to information management, interpretation and dissemination within the Table Mountain National Park terrestrial and marine protected areas.
Inside the operations room
Davids, who oversees the data capturing and vetting of information coming into the operations room, explained that the team facilitates information gathering and converts that information into intelligence so that the operators can fulfil their role and execute successful arrests.
“Over and above actual arrests and incidents, we have digitised all the information coming from the different sections in Table Mountain National Park. Everything had been written by hand in occurrence books, in fines, in just physical documentation. The girls documented 10 years’ worth of information.
“With that information, you can imagine the amount of data that allows us to do large-scale analysis in terms of trends over longer periods.”
Smith added that a lot of the time they work with partners to combat marine crime in the park, such as abalone poaching, which is deeply rooted in broad syndicates across South Africa and globally.
“We largely drive our operations towards preventing poachers from being able to drop off their divers and stop them from being able to enter the water,” she said.
Smith said terrestrial crimes include bark stripping – the removal of bark from a mature tree in the national park that can then be used in the illicit market for traditional medicine.
“We are aware that some people use bark in small amounts and they take it for subsistence use from various locations, or purchase it legally through established channels.
“Then there’s the illicit trade, where they indiscriminately remove bark from trees and it results in the death of that tree,” she said.
According to Smith, the environmental impact of bark stripping is that entire stands of trees in a natural forest will leave pockets of desolation because the role of those trees in that specific ecosystem has now been removed. This has knock-on effects on other parts of the environment.
The second type of terrestrial crime with which the team deals is the removal of proteas from Table Mountain National Park.
“These flowers are taken from the park and sold on the streets. In various markets on the streets of Cape Town, you’ll see rows and rows of buckets of flower heads – chances are that could be illegal. I’m not saying all of them are, but a great deal of them can be illegal,” Smith said.
She said the intention is to track where the crime is happening, keep a record and establish a trend line.
“If we see a repeat of that offence happening in the area, we can then say what are the commonalities of where that crime is taking place, and how best can we intervene to prevent that crime from happening,” Smith said.
Significant successes
Almost a year ago, the work done by the operations team led to a successful operation by the SEAM special operations rangers, which resulted in the arrest of three suspects caught in the act of stripping trees in Newlands Forest on 18 April 2023.
Smith said they conducted an extended operation when bark stripping was being reported every single day, with the help of community groups on social media and various stakeholder groups.
“What we ended up doing was what we call a waylay, an extended deployment. We had a team in various locations in a hotspot area known for the number of instances of bark stripping.
“They stayed put for about three days, and on the third night they heard the banging of an axe against a tree in the forest and they signalled to each other. They then gathered together, in a formation, and moved down towards where they heard the sound. They followed the sound without light, made their way to it and found a group of three men in the process of stripping trees, with a little fire going.
“They ambushed them and arrested them. We ended up confiscating about 40kg of bark that had been stripped from a tree, so that was a huge success,” Smith said.
But to get to that point took daily information gathering and determining the best possible position to intervene or catch people in the act.
“So behind the scenes, there’s a lot that needs to be done to get and refine our resources to aim for a specific target,” she said.
“There were weeks of work that went into planning this operation, to get people in a location that would be most ideal.”