Community Safety

1)      (a)  (i)    The top 30 police stations where the highest volume of murders were reported are based on the crime release for the period 1 April to 30 June 2020 (1^st Quarter)

                        (ii)    The top known motives/ causative factors for above stations: January to June 2020.

                 (b)  Provincial intervention and intelligence led operations are conducted at the top 8 identified crime hotspot stations. The top 30 provincial contact crime stations are monitored and operations at these stations are aligned to the Western Cape Hotspot Strategy. Tracing operations are conducted on a weekly basis to arrest perpetrators of serious and violent crime. A 72-hour activation plan has been put in place to address murders and attempted murders.   

(2)   (a)  (i)    (aa)  2018/2019:                         67

                               (bb)  2019/2020:                         86

                               (cc)  April – June 2020:              19

                        (ii)   (aa)  2018/2019:                         108

                               (bb)  2019/2020:                         121

                               (cc)  April – June 2020:              29

                        (iii) (aa)  2018/2019:                         247

                               (bb)  2019/2020:                         265

                               (cc)  April – June 2020:              38

The City of Cape Town informed me as follows:

3. In respect of the LEAP project, officers have been deployed in terms of the agreement as follows:

Nyanga-75 including supervisors;

Site C -74 members including supervisors;

Phillipi- 83 Including supervisors;

Bishop Lavis- 69 Including supervisors;

Delft -69 members including supervisors; and

Another 104 staff will be deployed to these respective areas shortly.

Minister of Community Safety

(2)    (b) Programmes to make the areas safe

The Provincial Strategic Objective of the Programme: Secretariat for Safety and security is to promote professional policing through effective oversight of the police in partnership with communities and organisations.  The idea of oversight is embedded in the ‘Whole-of-Society Approach’ to the notion of increasing safety, which means that a range of stakeholders are involved, not just traditional law-enforcement agencies and agents. This type of oversight involves members of civil society monitoring their environments as well as holding the SAPS accountable.

          The following are some of the programmes/interventions that have been put in place:

• The Expanded Partnership Programme (EPP) provides Community Police Forums (CPFs) with the structure to conduct oversight over the local SAPS whilst also allowing the space to form strong partnerships between CPFs, SAPS and the Department of Community Safety. In this way, CPFs and the EPP contributes to making safety everyone’s responsibility and thereby working towards safe and cohesive communities in the Province.  The Department provides EPP funding to the CPFs in the mentioned areas and has funded matching grant projects to facilitate their effective functioning and enhance active citizenship.  The matching grant system was a co-funding model that was based on past performance of the CPF on the EPP, where the Department funded CPFs to a maximum amount of R10,000.00 per project, based on certain terms and conditions.
• The Department also conducted consultative workshops with the following CPF clusters with the objectives of capacity building and increasing resilience to safety and security challenges:
• Nyanga Cluster (which includes Philippi East),
• Mitchells Plain Cluster (which includes Philippi),
• Bluedowns Cluster (which includes Delft and Mfuleni), and
• Khayelitsha Cluster (which includes Harare, Site B and Site C).
• The Department provides a supporting role to the SAPS with the establishment of CPFs.  In this regard, the Department has supported 66 CPFs before the Covid-19 lockdown period by facilitating the AGMs of these CPFs.  The SAPS runs the process of screening and vetting the elected members. When this is concluded, the Department, in partnership with SAPS, issues AGM certificates. After the certification process the Department invites those CPFs to participate on the EPP, by signing a Transfer Payment Agreement. This strengthens the oversight and partnership roles between the respective CPFs and the local SAPS, towards increased safety in the Province. 
• In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Department implemented the Neighbourhood Watch (NHW) Safety Improvement Patrollers with Covid-19 Relief Project.  The NHW project was initially planned to focus on regular safety improvement patrolling, however, with COVID-19 challenges, this focus was shifted to COVID-19 relief measures, including promoting civil compliance by encouraging social distancing and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) adherence, towards flattening the COVID-19 pandemic curve. 
• The Department is also in the process of implementing the NHW Schools Deployment Project which is focused on NHW deployment around schools. The purpose of the NHW Schools Deployment project is to address school safety and vandalism at identified high risk schools.  These high-risk schools were identified by the programme Security Risk Management in the Department.
• Furthermore, the Department has partnered with the City of Cape Town to fund the Law Enforcement Advancement Programme (LEAP).  The intention of the LEAP is to provide boots on the ground in order to increase safety in high crime areas.  The Department funded the recruitment of 500 LEAP Law Enforcement officers and the officers are placed in 5 priority areas being Bishop Lavis, Khayelitsha, Nyanga, Delft and Hanover Park.  The deployment of LEAP officers is done in cooperation with the South African Police Service and the deployment is based on current crime trends in these areas.
• The Department also partners with the City of Cape Town (COCT)to improve safety at schools in Khayelitsha and Delft.  The partnership concerns the training of school resource officers by the COCT who are then placed at vulnerable schools in high risk areas.  The school resilience scorecard, which a risk assessment done by Security Risk Management Programme in the Department, is used to determine at which schools school resource officers will be placed.  In Khayelitsha a total of 9 school resource officers were placed at four high risk schools. Similarly, 44 school resource officers were placed at 22 schools in Delft.  
• The Department has a long-standing relationship with religious institutions and have partnering with them since 2012 in the Youth Safety and Religious programme (YSRP).  Through the partnership with religious institutions the Department managed to keep youth from vulnerable areas off the streets by engaging them in activities during the June and December school holiday period.  Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the June school holiday programme could not be implemented, however, the Department intends to continue with the YSRP during the December/January school holidays.  

       (4)     The Department has been monitoring the rate and number of murders in the top 10 murder precincts in the Western Cape, for a number of years using the SAPS crime statistics which were released annually.  For the 2019/20 year, it has been monitoring on a weekly basis the homicides in the province as well as in the 11 Provincial Safety Plan Priority Areas and has used this to inform the Department’s strategy of service provision in the priority areas.

       (a)    Whilst the Department has not itself conducted studies into the causes of murders in these areas, it has drawn on literature reviews of the causes of murder in high crime areas with demographics like the Western Cape. The causes of violence are also reflected in the Western Cape Safety Plan and the Recovery Plan on Safety and in the Provincial Response to the National Anti-Gangsterism Strategy. An understanding of violence in these areas is based on a socioecological model, as presented in Figure 1 below:

Figure 1: Drivers of social violence as defined by the World Health Organisation

Risk factors of violence are prevalent at the individual, relationship, community and societal level.

At the individual level, factors such as whether a person has been exposed to trauma or violence, experience of inconsistent discipline, or has a problem with substance abuse. Personality disorders or some physiological factors (e.g. some types of brain damage) also play a role.

At the relationship level, factors such as the relationships between parents, and poor parenting practices play a role on a child. Exposure to violence between parents or in the family home is an additional factor. Whether a person associates with anti-social or violent peers also plays a role.

At the community level, factors such as poverty, high crime levels, overcrowding, socio economic inequality, etc. are factors. The areas identified in the parliamentary question are all areas which have a high vulnerability index, where there is a low socio-economic status, high levels of unemployment, low levels of education, and low levels of income. The physical lay out and infrastructure of an area also play a role – overcrowded areas, lighting, road accessibility, and basis services such as water and sanitation. Urban design also plays an important role.

At the societal level are factors such as cultural norms which support violence. This may be so prevalent as to have permeated the culture in the home and among social peers as well. Issues like a weak or overburdened law enforcement system also play a role here. In these areas, there is often a low police to population ratio and high crime rates. We also need to take into account the availability of drugs, alcohol as well as weapons such as knives and firearms and ammunition.

(b) Refer to response 5(2)(b) above for information on the interventions.