Province monitors efficiency of courts

THE provincial government is monitoring courts and compiling its own murder statistics, Premier Helen Zille says.

Legal experts and students working for her administration were monitoring the effectiveness of courts in the Western Cape, Zille said on Friday in her State of the Province address.

The police and courts were the responsibility of the national government, but she said “all our oversight interventions are aimed at supporting the SAPS in delivering more effective policing in the province and increasing the public’s trust and confidence in the criminal justice system”.

Zille believes the provincial government’s gathering of its own “real time” data from provincial mortuaries helps it to focus on crime rates in specific areas.

“(This) will enable us to be more responsive to local safety needs, and correlate the incidence of crime with other factors, such as the availability of alcohol,” she said.

The Western Cape government released its first “shadow” crime report last September and plans to release a new one every six months.

Zille said the provincial government aimed to eventually release a report every quarter.

It also sends its legal experts and university postgraduate law students to attend and record court cases.

The experts and students focus on gang-related crimes and look for failures in the system.

The provincial government reports incidents to Western Cape police commissioner Arno Lamoer.