The forum of Cape Flats Civics says the call for citizens to record taxi road rage incidents and delinquent road behaviour now makes the public responsible for the City’s enforcement duties and may place them in harm’s way.
This after mayco member for Safety and Security, JP Smith, recently said their office had been “inundated with reports of dangerous driving behaviour of minibus taxis continuing, with constant videos been shared as evidence of such”.
A Google document was created and shared for residents to record the incidents and submit their photos or videos, along with the date and location.
However, the chairperson of the Forum for Cape Flats Civics, Lester September, said the move was a “deflection from the City’s own failures”.
“The City’s request is pure obfuscation and deflection aimed at diverting attention away from their own failures to deal with taxi violence and related delinquent behaviour.
“The reality is that the main enforcement in the City, created to deal with taxi violence as seen during the taxi strike, being metro police, has an 80% to 90% deficit.
“While Smith speaks about the deficit in SAPS –which is more a misallocation of SAPS resources to the inner city instead of where they needed on the Cape Flats –the main enforcement within the City have had their hands tied behind their backs.
“Asking further for the public to take photos of taxis that are guilty of road rage now makes the public responsible for the City's enforcement duties, and puts us in harm’s way,” said September.
Smith denied September’s comments: “With regards to taxi enforcement, we have never sought to deflect blame and have consistently acted and in an increasingly effective manner, to the point where the taxis resorted to violence to attempt to block us from doing enforcement.
“We were well over 4 000 staff members in number and now exceed 5 500, so we have achieved the deployment goal which we set out, although more would be required to make up for the deficit in SAPS deployment, which is well below international best practice.”
He recently said incidents recorded on the database would be shared directly with the Provincial Regulation Entity and the Western Cape government, and also the SA National Taxi Council, for them to action it directly with their members.
Cape Times