‘World’s most dangerous city’
That’s what Cape Town will become if cops fail to halt surge in gangland killings
Cape Town risks becoming the world’s most dangerous city.
As the murder rate in the Mother City spirals, it has emerged that a botched attempt to set up a police squad to rein in murderous gangs has backfired, leaving a trail of dead bodies and recrimination in its wake.
While politicians bicker and police commanders wage their own civil war, hundreds of poorly trained officers have become sitting ducks for the gangs.
Six anti-gang unit officers were shot during an operation in Philippi on June 12. The attack followed a 54-hour period in which 62 murder victims arrived in Cape Town mortuaries.
According to figures from Professor Lorna Martin, head of forensic pathology in the Western Cape, by the end of April the city’s mortuaries in Tygerberg and Salt River had handled 1,280 murder victims. More than half had been shot, she said.
If the body count is maintained, it will make Cape Town — SA’s flag-bearer in attracting international tourists — the world’s most dangerous city ranked by the number of murders, with 3,900.
According to the Citizen Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice, which compiles global lists from official statistics, the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, was the 2017 murder capital with 3,387 homicides.
Cape Town was 15th in the 2017 survey, and 11th in 2018, based on its per capita murder rate (murders per 100,000 people), but in the past year murders have shot up by 15%.
The per capita murder rate of approximately 97.3 per 100,000 so far this year would have propelled it to fourth in the 2018 list, where all the cities in the top 10 are in Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil and at the centre of the international drug trade.
JP Smith, the City of Cape Town mayoral committee member for safety and security, said: “We’re on a meteoric climb, and if we don’t do something urgent we will end up as the world’s most dangerous city.
“The statistics are trending in an absolutely alarming direction.”
The anti-gang unit, launched last November in Hanover Park by President Cyril Ramaphosa, was transferred to national control this week by police minister Bheki Cele, who said during the state of the nation debate that this was because “gangsterism is spreading across the country”.
But a Cape Town lawyer who represents the unit’s commander, Maj-Gen Andre Lincoln, said the unit had been set up to fail. Johan Nortje told the Sunday Times it had been launched six months before the elections as an ANC attempt to gain votes on the Cape Flats.
“It was part of a whole election thing in the Western Cape, the reason it started here, because you know [then DA premier] Helen Zille has been asking for the longest time for an anti-gang unit and they always said no, and now shortly before the election they suddenly launch it,” said Nortje.
But he said the unit was improperly constituted and relied for its personnel on shortterm secondments from police stations throughout the province.
“The employment regulations in [the South African Police Service] make it very clear how a unit is supposed to be set up. A whole work study needs to be done, there needs to be Treasury approval, all that stuff. That was never done, this thing was just launched overnight,” he said.
As the fallout from the soaring murder rate and the anti-gang unit’s failure gathered momentum this week, it emerged that:
● Lt-Gen Khombinkosi Jula will be removed as Western Cape provincial commissioner after a year of bitter squabbles over resources and a cut-throat battle for his job;
● Western Cape premier Alan Winde is concerned that controversial provincial detective chief Maj-Gen Jeremy Vearey is being considered to replace Jula;
● The other candidate is Maj-Gen Peter Jacobs, recently appointed to head crime intelligence; and
● Police are appealing against a Cape Town high court judgment that exonerated anti-gang unit boss Lincoln of corruption related to his relationship with Italian mafia boss Vito Palazzolo.
A police ministry statement in November said the anti-gang unit was “made up of members from specialised units with an objective to dislodge and terminally weaken the capacity of the gangs”.
But Nortje said the unit was a laughing stock among gangsters. “The people are seconded, they’re not appointed to official positions. There are no clear guidelines about
who is being reported to,” he said.
“The guys in the stations don’t know if they should get involved in gang violence cases because there is now a unit for that. The unit doesn’t know exactly what its mandate is. The gangs can see what’s going on. They are laughing at the police because it looks like the police themselves don’t really know what they’re doing.”
Trade union Solidarity said 1,035 officers, many of them members of the union, were seconded to operations such as the anti-gang unit. Public sector organiser Ronel Stander said this took resources from stations.
One such operation was the major offences reaction team (Mort), which depleted resources at units including the flying squad.
“The establishment of these entities merely aggravates an already flawed system,” said Stander. “Establishing such entities under the guise of ‘operations’ undermines effective policing as there is little to no control over the members, who by all accounts drive around aimlessly.
“Most of the members found at the operations are very junior members who have just completed basic training and are placed in areas they do not know. When faced with crisis situations they literally run away.”
Police officers and sources who have worked with the unit said some members were poorly prepared. “I’ve been with those guys when they kick down doors. There are ordinary visible policing members who’ve been given a big gun and an [anti-gang unit] badge and told to go do operations,” said a police source.
Several detectives have also been seconded to the unit, leaving piles of investigations unattended at their home stations.
Jula, who was on leave this week ahead of his reported transfer to KwaZulu-Natal from August 1, declined to comment about the anti-gang unit and attacks he has faced since the start of the year from Vearey’s unofficial spokesman, Colin Arendse.
Reflecting on Arendse’s Facebook posts, in which he describes Jula as a “Bantustan despot” or a “Bantustan stooge”, Smith told a news conference this week: “I have never in all my career seen a senior police officer use a proxy to assassinate a fellow senior police officer’s career like that. It is disgusting.”
But the battle lines were drawn when Jula gave Lincoln — a Vearey ally — 1 out of 5 for his performance as the winelands visible policing head. Lincoln instigated a grievance, calling for Jula to be disciplined for “unfair labour practice” and demanding to be allowed to report to the national commissioner instead. Animosity has been further fuelled by the Western Cape police’s decision to ask the Supreme Court of Appeal to overturn Lincoln’s exoneration in the Palazzolo corruption case.
Police spokesperson Brig Vish Naidoo would not comment on Jula’s alleged removal or who might replace him. “As of today, the commissioner is not being replaced,” he said yesterday.
“Jula … is the provincial commissioner. I can’t say what will happen in the future. That position doesn’t belong to anyone. If someone is being replaced, the national commissioner will announce it when he announces it and it will be done in the interest of service delivery.”
Winde is understood to be writing to national police commissioner Gen Khehla Sitole over concerns Vearey may replace Jula.
“If it is the case that SAPS is going to employ a new police commissioner, then they are obliged to consult with the Western Cape government,” he said.
“Should this happen, we would want an individual of the highest integrity, who has no factional relationships, who does not have any political affiliations or allegations of ties to the gang underworld.”
Vearey did not respond to questions from the Sunday Times.
A senior source in the DA-run provincial government said Vearey had always been opposed as a candidate to lead the Western Cape police because of his strong ties to the ANC. “His appointment will be an impossibility. We won’t allow that,” said the source.
Smith said there had been more than 900 murders in Cape Town’s gang strongholds in the past year, double the previous record.
Elsies River community policing forum chair Imraah Mukkaddam equated the situation to a civil war. “Five nights out of seven, gunfire is going off four or five times. I monitor about 20 WhatsApp groups and every night you just hear: shooting here, someone was killed there, police responding to shooting in that area,” he said.
“For us volunteers to be in this civil war is excruciating, to have to deal with all those victims. For every person who is killed there are thousands who are injured. It’s extremely traumatic for the children growing up here.”
David Bruce, an independent researcher who specialises in policing, said the government had “never responded in a coherent way to violent crime”, and there was “enormous scope” for it to do so.
Five nights out of seven, gunfire goes off four or five times Imraah Mukkaddam Elsies River community policing forum chair