Wings clipped as flying squad cars stay elusive

THE five high-performance police vehicles that Safety and Liaison MEC Weziwe Tikana claims the specialist police flying squad unit has are nowhere to be found.

Police top brass and Tikana have failed to say where the cars are.

While police management deny the unit is collapsing, little action appears to have been taken to intervene.

For the past two weeks, both the K9 unit and flying squad have been operating with two vehicles each, according to police sources.

A further two flying squad vehicles were only released from the state garage after several queries from The Herald.

The K9 unit and flying squad respond to serious and violent crimes such as gang violence, armed robberies and hijackings.

DA MPL Bobby Stevenson said yesterday that Tikana, in a written response on March 4, claimed the unit had 11 cars, of which five were highperformance vehicles. Yesterday, neither police management nor Tikana would say where all these cars were.

Instead, police spokesman Colonel Sibongile Soci said: “The information the MEC presented is the true reflection of what was provided by police.”

Earlier this week, The Herald reported how some flying squad officers claimed to have been sent home due to no vehicles being available.

In Tikana’s reply to Stevenson, she said the unit had 11 vehicles when they should only have eight.

But unit officials said they had no high-performance vehicles and had been using no more than four cars since January.

“We don’t even have normal-functioning cars. We definitely do not have any five high-performance cars,” one frustrated police official said.

Safety and Liaison Department spokesman Michael Msebi said: “We are a caring government which is committed and dedicated in rendering high-quality service.”

He said the department would continue to engage with the relevant departments for budget allocation to buy more vehicles in the interest of community safety.