Political debates continue with crime as today's topic.

Wayne Boonzaaier

28 July 2016

With the local government elections ahead, the political debates at the Bush radio studious are still well under way.

With it being the fourth day of political debates today’s topic was crime; what political parties will do to prevent and decrease the crime rate in Cape Town.

Listeners submitted questions, regarding crime in their community’s and the possibility of decreasing crime rate, for the political party representatives to address.

One of the remarks received was from a Mitchell’s Plains local discussing how crime is rife in their community and accused the DA of not doing anything about.

To which, JP Smith, the DA Mayoral Safety and Security member answered:

“We went from a situation where we took over from the ANC with 1876 staff, we are now sitting with over 3000 staff. We are deploying metro police on a fixed basis.

Our metro police officers are deployed to one specific community and they work in that community every day.

We all agree we need more staff. But the budget is not allowing that once you’re in council you will discover that you have massive competing   crisis with electricity, and housing.

There are many competitive things in council and people who sit on the outside don’t fully appreciate this until they’re in council then they become a lot more quitter.

When you are in local government you are dependent on systems in the criminal justice system that other spheres of government control and this is a reality and if you don’t understand that you are too ignorant to be part of this debate.

We have an operational plan to continue increasing resources, you will see incremental increases every year as wave been doing over five years but on a stable and responsible basis that the rate payers can absorb, not wild budget increases that the rate payers cannot deal with.”

Another questioned was submitted, saying “How will ICOSA deal with crime?”

ICOSA’s Richard Cock replied “When people vote ICOSA into power we’re not making promises.

Crime is everyone’s responsibility, we will implement an integrated approach that is budget driven.

The department of Safety and Security in the City of Cape Town is doing well but that department is starved of budget. We will prioritise budget to fight crime.

We would want to develop programmes where we take communities and make everyone in the community responsible for preventing crime.

We will get the City of Cape Town to develop a combative forum where we have a unit that will deal with gangsterism and drugs.

We will involve all community forums with regards to fighting crime.”