Cape Town - A delegation led by Premier Alan Winde, which included the police, conducted an oversight visit to Hanover Park where Law Enforcement Advancement Plan (Leap) officers were deployed as part of a safety plan last year.
Winde, Community Safety MEC Albert Fritz, acting station commander for Philippi police station, Jacobus Fredericks, and Safety and Security Mayco member JP Smith assessed the officers’ work.
During their visit they heard that since the deployment of the officers in February last year, they had made 153 arrests for crimes including possession of firearms (four arrests), possession of illegal ammunition (two arrests), possession of dangerous weapons (25 arrests), rape and sexual assault (one arrest each), theft (six arrests), dealing in drugs (two arrests), domestic violence (three arrests) and assault (three arrests).
Winde said that since becoming premier, safety had been his key concern, and that in his State of the Province Address (Sopa) last year he had committed to making safety a priority for the Western Cape.
Winde said Covid-19 may have affected some of their programmes, but he remained committed to ensuring that residents felt safer.
“It is for this reason that we have stuck with our plans to roll out the next 500 Leap officers in the Western Cape. During my visit today (yesterday) I announced that the first 250 of these officers will begin training in April, to be deployed in July," said Winde.
He added that the next 250 would begin training in July, for deployment in October. Once they had been trained, the officers would form part of their area-based teams (ABT), which would ultimately be rolled out in 16 crime hot spots in the province, supporting the police and other law enforcement agencies in crime prevention.
Fritz said those interventions would be boosted further by the launch of the ABT initiative, later this month, starting in Hanover Park.
He said the ABT model aimed to pool together safety resources that included neighbourhood watches, community policing forums, walking buses, police and law enforcement and other safety stakeholders to ensure that they responded to crime by taking a data-driven and evidence-based approach.
Smith said: "Our law enforcement officers care about the people in the communities they serve and want to see them transform into safe environments that we can all live in more peacefully."
Cape Argus