City addresses Wynberg residents on safety issues
WYNBERG Civic Centre was packed to the rafters on Wednesday night with almost 200 residents from Grassy Park, Plumstead, Wynberg and other suburbs who had gathered at a public safety meeting to express their ongoing frustration at the high levels of crime, vagrancy, homelessness and traffic in their areas.
The meeting was hosted by ward councillors Carmen Siebritz and Emile Langenhoven, together with safety and security mayoral committee member JP Smith, community services and health mayco member Patricia van der Ross, MEC for Community Safety and Police Oversight Reagen Allen and the SAPS, who shared alarming statistics about crime in these areas.
At the meeting, Wynberg resident Gabriel Cumptsy said he had moved into the area about four months ago and, within a week, he had experienced an attempted break-in. Within six weeks, he had suffered two more. In the last week, a neighbouring house was subjected to four attempted breakins. “Every day when I leave my house and come home, I am confronted by people sitting on Prasa (Passenger Rail Agency of SA) land doing drugs. If they are not there, they are sitting on the corner. This has been going on for 4½ months.
“I have communicated with other residents, and they have told me they have attempted to communicate with Prasa, but the agency has done nothing. I want to know what is being done with my tax money to keep me and my fellow residents safe,” Cumptsy said.
This was the sentiment of many at the meeting. Wynberg resident Allan Harrick said: “The whole Wynberg area has become unsafe. There are a lot of criminal activities and break-ins in particular have increased. Wynberg is bursting at the seams. There are so many people. We don’t even know where to walk any more.”
In response to the residents’ pleas for more resources to combat crime, Smith said the crime statistics in these areas compared with the rest of the city were modest. He said the only way to make intelligent decisions was on the basis of relevant data.
Smith said that 10 out of 60 communities, 10 out of 60 police stations, generated half of the city’s violent crime statistics and Wynberg was not one of those. However, he said the area did have a serious urban decay problem.
“This is being generated by homelessness and our inability to remove the structures kept in place by series of unfortunate court rulings, most of which we are busy appealing,” Smith said.
He said they were also applying for eviction orders for illegal settlements.
Allen added: “If we look at robberies at non-residential properties, Wynberg was number 17 in the province. If we consider property-related crime, Wynberg was number 15 in the entire province.”