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A Northern Cape police officer allegedly shot his girlfriend before shooting himself.
- Cracking down on gangsters isn’t as easy as packing everyone with a gang tattoo into a Nyala and arresting them, Maj. Gen. Jeremy Vearey said.
- He and his colleagues told the security committee of the Western Cape legislature that their work involved extensive investigations that could take years.
- Cape Town city and provincial security authorities and police alike were put on the spot over their strategies to tackle gang violence.
Solving the gang crisis in the Western Cape isn’t as easy as stopping everyone with a gang tattoo, Lead Detective Maj. Gen. Jeremy Vearey said Wednesday.
“It’s not as simple as hanging out in a Nyala in Manenberg and picking up anyone the police think is a Hard Livings [a Cape Town gang]”Vearey added.
He said it involved painstaking long-term intelligence gathering to build a case that a court would not rule out. Vearey, Acting Provincial Commissioner Thembisile Patekile, the Western Cape Community Safety Department and the City of Cape Town were summoned to the Western Cape Legislature’s Community Safety Committee to explain what they were doing to curb gang violence.
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Three shootings, which left six people dead on Sunday, were high on the minds of committee members as they demanded responses from those tasked with preventing these incidents from occurring. Pieter Marais of FF Plus wanted to know why the police did not simply round up people who identified with gangs through their clothing and their “tjaps” (gang tattoos).
Vearey said: “The case in Mfuleni, and as we find more and more in Khayelitsha, [requires] that we really get back to seeing the way we think about gangs, and [not] thinking of it as just people with their front teeth out and walking in a certain way in Manenberg. ”
He added that it was a detailed intelligence gathering exercise with many agencies within the limits of the Organized Crime Prevention Act. [POCA]and the construction of a case that a judge would accept as evidence of criminal activity.
“In all the cases dealt with so far in the Western Cape, we must first prove that the gang we are bringing in is a criminal gang. It is not enough to say that it is a gang.”
The state must prove the criminal activities associated with them, regardless of whether they belonged to the old number gangs – 26, 27 and 28 – that declared criminal activity in their “code” or to more recent gangs, Vearey said.
He added that the POCA dealt specifically with what constituted a gang member, and judges relied on this when deciding a conviction and sentence. These requirements include admitting membership in a criminal gang, being identified as a gangster by a parent or guardian, long-term observation by the police, and physical evidence such as tattoos.
However, tattoos alone weren’t enough because some people got tattoos as children to pretend they were in a gang, Vearey said. Meanwhile, detectives work on new leads and observe changes in usual activity. One of them was an observation around 2009 or 2010 that after a shooting, the scene was littered with shell casings.
This was different from the previous pattern of shooters firing only a few shots and leaving. This led police to wonder where they got so many bullets that they had enough to change magazines and keep firing. Vearey said investigators eventually found that sports gun licenses were being issued at a police station in Olifantsfontein. With a sports firearms license, massive amounts of ammunition could be purchased supposedly for “sports practice.”
Twenty-one people, including suspected 28-year-old gang members, and police officers will go to trial in August for this case.
His colleague, the late Lt. Col. Charl Kinnear, was investigating a similar case when he was shot and killed in front of his Bishop Lavis home on September 18, 2020. Kinnear’s focus was on how some private security companies were quickly arming themselves. .
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Patekile said that dealing with poverty and providing alternative role models for young people could play an essential role in preventing gangsterism.
“There is an alternative governance and economy that the gangs are providing to those communities,” he told the committee.
“Now, first you have to deal with the attacks, that the community is throwing stones at you. Most of the time, when we get there, nobody wants to speak and they never speak.” The head of the Anti-Gang Unit (AGU), Major General Andre Lincoln, is in charge of 191 officers of which 140 are in uniform, 45 are detectives and six provide support. Its operations are centered in Cape Town and include Overberg and Worcester, where police have identified gang activity.
Police have also held a workshop on handling extortion, which has emerged as another risk in the province, where gangs demand protection money from companies.
Cape Town City Watch Director Robbie Roberts said the city had 1,462 law enforcement officers, 568 subway police officers and 322 Cape Town Traffic Services operational officers who assisted with the strategy. broader police force. It has a relatively new program called the Law Enforcement Promotion Plan, which is a partnership between the Western Cape government and the City that focuses on drugs, weapons, and liquor.
The city has units for dogs and horses, a CCTV network and plans to use drones soon. However, he only has one CCTV camera in Mfuleni, where the recent shootings took place.
