Westville under siege
Westville appears to be under siege from a spiralling crime wave, and the residents have had enough! Terence Pillay investigates.
A few years ago the Upper Highway Area in Durban experienced a violent wave of crime. It appears that the crime has now moved down to Westville. It might sound a little dramatic but last year there were four murders and it’s only the start of the second month in the year and already there’s been one murder – never mind the innumerable housebreakings.
In one night last week, there were five housebreakings. That’s five in one night! There was also an armed robbery in progress and the neighbourhood watch patrol responded – they didn’t have green lights in the car, so for all intents and purposes, it may have been just someone driving past – and these robbers opened fire on them with AK 47s. This was a domestic housebreaking. One man had seven bullet holes in his car and the other one five bullet holes.
Now imagine if you were just driving down a road, not responding to anything because you’re not aware of a housebreaking in progress, and just because you happen to be in the area these robbers are so brazen they think, “We don’t want to have the problem of these people driving down the road, let’s just shoot at them” They don’t care.
I’ve spoken to several residents in Westville and they say that similar stories are making their way on to the various community WhatsApp groups. Westville North has their own control room, which employs four people that monitor the cameras that the residents put up themselves. The Metro on the other hand have four cameras up but only one of them is working. They had to put pressure on the Deputy Mayor Fawzia Peer to have a temporary mobile one put in. And this is the upside to this story.
People are terrified. One man I spoke to said that he’s just spent thirty six thousand rands, which is a grudge buy, putting in beams around his house, scared that if he doesn’t have them, these robbers would target him and leave those who are actually protected.
But the residents’ ask why they should be doing this and spending money that many of them don’t have when the police should actually be doing their jobs. They say they have a right to be safe and they are absolutely correct. Part of the problem, some say, is the fact that they’ve had an acting station commander at the Westville Police Station for close to two years now, so there’s no urgency and no consistency.
The residents I chatted to believe that the area needs to be declared a crime state and that would in turn cause the provincial or national government to take notice. One resident I spoke to said that SAPS had pulled all the assault rifles away from the police station, so what you have is civilians being attacked with AK 47s and you expect the police to come and respond with hand guns? If SAPS are scared and the morale is low, what do you expect from the community?
So the question I’d like to ask is: what is the relationship between Metro and SAPS when it comes to tackling these issues? I’ve been told that SAPS is controlled by the national government while the Metro Police fall under the responsibility of the city. But how does this community now leverage off this resource of the city to improve the situation.
So a meeting was called last week with the community and the Deputy Mayor Fawzia Peer, the video recording of which I watched with great interest. Firstly she did arrive with a barrage of private security (the pictures of which are on the blog) so this drain on recourses didn’t help what I believe was a misguided attempt to understand the problem. But that aside, the general idea of the meeting was to try and have a co-ordinated effort to combat crime in the area.
So the feeling I got when watching this video is that they thought they were coming with a novel solution to the problem by bringing the community together and asking them to get to know their neighbours and to patrol their streets. They have been doing that already, it’s not new information. One of the suggestions was to start a WhatsApp group for the various streets, but these residents have already successfully been utilising this tool.
For me, these people from the city should have come through with more proactive suggestions and asked the community for the intelligence to put those in place. So what I gleaned from the video was that whenever someone from the community stood up a gave a suggestion or highlighted an issue, for example, someone said that the Westville Police Station is largely under-resources and they believed there was mismanagement at the station, the city would respond with something like: “We don’t want to hear criticisms of the SAPS but constructive ideas of tackling the problem” – of course I’m paraphrasing here.
But for me, a very constructive idea would be for Fawzia Peer to use her influence as a Deputy Mayor to go and make a call to the MEC for Community, Safety and Liaison and tell him about the situation of the under-resourced SAPS in Westville and ask them to provide more personnel. So there appeared to be no opportunity to ask sensible questions because it seemed to have become this ridiculous standoff, with excuse after excuse from the city.
What would have been a far better outcome is if the Deputy Mayor and her team within the security cluster, like the Metro and all these units that she sits with, had come there and said, “We understand the issues and what you’ve done in establishing these community groups and this how you’ve responded! And I as the Deputy Mayor can only do this and this and this. As a community, what do you think is the best response given the current situation that we’re facing?” And right up front she should have said that she only had access to limited resources and the community would not have faced these empty promises.
The Metro Police also had an opportunity to say what they were doing at this meeting and they told the people about the fact that they were deploying about two hundred new traffic wardens and that somehow in the future; this was going to help the community. I don’t understand how employing traffic wardens, who don’t carry a firearm by the way, is going to match these organised robbers who carry automatic weapons!
A representative of the Westville North area stood up and said they want to apply for a SRA or special rates area and under that they could take control of some of their security issues. For example, the financial resources that become available through an SRA would allow them to put in additional cameras, and other measures.
The way it works in Durban is that they would have to get sixty six percent buy-in with a minimum of a thousand households. And once you get that buy-in then every household is forced by law to pay additional rates. It works out to roughly two hundred rands a month extra per household. They pay that money to the municipality and the municipality in turn pays that to a section 21, Not For Profit Company and that company manages the additional resources that the community wants to put in place. But it’s an administrative, red-tape nightmare trying to put this in place. The community asked the Deputy Mayor to speed up the process seeing as this was a special circumstance, and she didn’t even respond to that. And that was a constructive, community-based solution to the problem.
In one night last week, there were five housebreakings. That’s five in one night! There was also an armed robbery in progress and the neighbourhood watch patrol responded – they didn’t have green lights in the car, so for all intents and purposes, it may have been just someone driving past – and these robbers opened fire on them with AK 47s. This was a domestic housebreaking. One man had seven bullet holes in his car and the other one five bullet holes.
Now imagine if you were just driving down a road, not responding to anything because you’re not aware of a housebreaking in progress, and just because you happen to be in the area these robbers are so brazen they think, “We don’t want to have the problem of these people driving down the road, let’s just shoot at them” They don’t care.
I’ve spoken to several residents in Westville and they say that similar stories are making their way on to the various community WhatsApp groups. Westville North has their own control room, which employs four people that monitor the cameras that the residents put up themselves. The Metro on the other hand have four cameras up but only one of them is working. They had to put pressure on the Deputy Mayor Fawzia Peer to have a temporary mobile one put in. And this is the upside to this story.
People are terrified. One man I spoke to said that he’s just spent thirty six thousand rands, which is a grudge buy, putting in beams around his house, scared that if he doesn’t have them, these robbers would target him and leave those who are actually protected.
But the residents’ ask why they should be doing this and spending money that many of them don’t have when the police should actually be doing their jobs. They say they have a right to be safe and they are absolutely correct. Part of the problem, some say, is the fact that they’ve had an acting station commander at the Westville Police Station for close to two years now, so there’s no urgency and no consistency.
The residents I chatted to believe that the area needs to be declared a crime state and that would in turn cause the provincial or national government to take notice. One resident I spoke to said that SAPS had pulled all the assault rifles away from the police station, so what you have is civilians being attacked with AK 47s and you expect the police to come and respond with hand guns? If SAPS are scared and the morale is low, what do you expect from the community?
So the question I’d like to ask is: what is the relationship between Metro and SAPS when it comes to tackling these issues? I’ve been told that SAPS is controlled by the national government while the Metro Police fall under the responsibility of the city. But how does this community now leverage off this resource of the city to improve the situation.
So a meeting was called last week with the community and the Deputy Mayor Fawzia Peer, the video recording of which I watched with great interest. Firstly she did arrive with a barrage of private security (the pictures of which are on the blog) so this drain on recourses didn’t help what I believe was a misguided attempt to understand the problem. But that aside, the general idea of the meeting was to try and have a co-ordinated effort to combat crime in the area.
So the feeling I got when watching this video is that they thought they were coming with a novel solution to the problem by bringing the community together and asking them to get to know their neighbours and to patrol their streets. They have been doing that already, it’s not new information. One of the suggestions was to start a WhatsApp group for the various streets, but these residents have already successfully been utilising this tool.
For me, these people from the city should have come through with more proactive suggestions and asked the community for the intelligence to put those in place. So what I gleaned from the video was that whenever someone from the community stood up a gave a suggestion or highlighted an issue, for example, someone said that the Westville Police Station is largely under-resources and they believed there was mismanagement at the station, the city would respond with something like: “We don’t want to hear criticisms of the SAPS but constructive ideas of tackling the problem” – of course I’m paraphrasing here.
But for me, a very constructive idea would be for Fawzia Peer to use her influence as a Deputy Mayor to go and make a call to the MEC for Community, Safety and Liaison and tell him about the situation of the under-resourced SAPS in Westville and ask them to provide more personnel. So there appeared to be no opportunity to ask sensible questions because it seemed to have become this ridiculous standoff, with excuse after excuse from the city.
What would have been a far better outcome is if the Deputy Mayor and her team within the security cluster, like the Metro and all these units that she sits with, had come there and said, “We understand the issues and what you’ve done in establishing these community groups and this how you’ve responded! And I as the Deputy Mayor can only do this and this and this. As a community, what do you think is the best response given the current situation that we’re facing?” And right up front she should have said that she only had access to limited resources and the community would not have faced these empty promises.
The Metro Police also had an opportunity to say what they were doing at this meeting and they told the people about the fact that they were deploying about two hundred new traffic wardens and that somehow in the future; this was going to help the community. I don’t understand how employing traffic wardens, who don’t carry a firearm by the way, is going to match these organised robbers who carry automatic weapons!
A representative of the Westville North area stood up and said they want to apply for a SRA or special rates area and under that they could take control of some of their security issues. For example, the financial resources that become available through an SRA would allow them to put in additional cameras, and other measures.
The way it works in Durban is that they would have to get sixty six percent buy-in with a minimum of a thousand households. And once you get that buy-in then every household is forced by law to pay additional rates. It works out to roughly two hundred rands a month extra per household. They pay that money to the municipality and the municipality in turn pays that to a section 21, Not For Profit Company and that company manages the additional resources that the community wants to put in place. But it’s an administrative, red-tape nightmare trying to put this in place. The community asked the Deputy Mayor to speed up the process seeing as this was a special circumstance, and she didn’t even respond to that. And that was a constructive, community-based solution to the problem.
At the end of the day, the question is what are the sustainable solutions to keeping a community safe and secure? The city and Metro didn’t seem to have any. So the community continue to live in fear that they will be broken into, or at worst suffer and assault that could be fatal like some have experience.
So this is the story. Next week I am going to go and get some answers from both the city and the police so please tune in to that.
You can email Terence Pillay at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter: @terencepillay1 and tweet him your thoughts.