Pretoria – Amid the rampant violent crime, police in Gauteng have observed more people are carrying replica firearms in an attempt the protect themselves when confronted by criminals.
Speaking to television broadcaster Newzroom Afrika after the release of the provincial crime statistics, Gauteng’s police commissioner, Lieutenant-General Elias Mawela, said replica firearms had become a trend.
“We do recover a lot of illegal firearms. If you can check, even previously when we were destroying these illegal firearms, you would see that the contribution of Gauteng as a province is very high because we recover a lot of firearms in this space. But the more we recover illegal firearms, more come into the province and it worries us most,” said Mawela.
“But another new phenomenon, which we have just discovered, we find more and more people – I will call them law-abiding citizens – they arm themselves with replica firearms, toy guns. They look like real firearms and when you ask them, they tell you this thing is for protection. People say ‘we don’t feel safe’. Those are law-abiding citizens.”
However, Mawela said in and around the Joburg CBD, the replica firearms were a common tool for committing robberies.
“You find this group in Johannesburg central, who are using the replica firearms to commit street robberies,” he said.
Mawela said the province was seeing a spate of kidnappings linked to hijackings. He said the most common hijackings were committed by criminals who wanted a vehicle for a specific “mission” and dumped it afterwards.
“Robbery with aggravating circumstances remains a headache for us in Gauteng. It constitutes hijackings, robbery of businesses and residential (places), truck hijackings and CITs (cash-in-transit robberies). All those categories are the ones contributing to robbery with aggravating circumstances.
“But the main problematic one is the hijackings. Also, the kidnappings are linked to the hijackings because when you hijack a vehicle then you take along the driver or passenger in that vehicle – whether for five or 10 minutes – when we register hijacking, we add a case of kidnapping.
“We have seen that most of the people hijack the vehicles for transport use. The Uber vehicles are being taken and once the people have arrived at their destinations, they just abandon that vehicle. We’ve also seen that people hijack delivery trucks for purposes of taking the cargo. After taking the cargo, they dump it,” said Mawela.
Mawela said in Gauteng, there was a syndicate hijacking vehicles with the aim of taking them across the borders.
“Mostly it’s the high-powered vehicles being taken out of the country. Another syndicate hijacks vehicles to use in the commission of another crime. When they go and commit crime, they do not want to use their own vehicles (as) they can be easily tracked,” he said.
Earlier this week, Statistics South Africa raised the alarm on the significant increase in hijackings across South Africa over the past 12 months.
Releasing the results of the Victims of Crime Report from the Governance, Public Safety and Justice Survey (GPSJS) 2021/22 at a media briefing in Pretoria, Statistician-General Risenga Maluleke said there has been a marked increase in hijackings.
“There has been a significant increase in hijackings between the 2020/21 and 2021/22 period … In the 2020/21 period there were 151 000, and now we have gone all the way to 330 000 in the past five years,” he said.
According to the Stats SA survey, about 62.9% of people who experienced hijackings reported some or all of the incidents to the police.
About 1.1 million people aged 16 and older experienced theft of personal property in 2021/22. That percentage represents 2.6% of South Africa’s population aged 16 and older.
Additionally, more than 2 million households across South Africa have experienced burglaries.
“Around 2.2 million households experienced housebreaking or burglary during the past five years. The experience of housebreaking has increased by 14% from the previous year,” Maluleke said at Stats SA’s Isibalo House in Salvokop, Pretoria.
The Victims of Crime Report covers the experience of specific types of crime by households and individuals, the incidences, and the reporting of crime. This includes housebreaking, theft of personal property, assault, vehicle hijacking and home robbery, among others.
Unlike the SAPS crime statistics, which are based on crimes reported at police stations, Maluleke said his survey is based on visiting households across South Africa and asking residents about their experiences in line with general safety.
IOL