DA Response to Rupert Abrogates Responsibility for Western Cape Gangsterism

GOOD Statement by Brett Herron, GOOD Secretary General & Member of the Western Cape Provincial Parliament:

The DA has outrageously washed its hands of responsibility for transforming the culture of gangsterism in the Western Cape until it is given control of the police.

The party has been running the governments of Cape Town and the Western Cape for nearly two decades, more than long enough to implement its policies and programmes, but it takes no responsibility for gangsterism, which it blames solely on incompetent national policing.

Less than 48 hours after the DA was called out in the White House over pervasive gangsterism and violent crime by billionaire Western Cape resident Johan Rupert, National Minister of Police Senzo Mchunu released the country’s latest crime statistics revealing that nearly 90% of the country’s gang murders occur in the Western Cape (where 12% of the country’s population lives).

Mayor of Cape Town Geordin Hill-Lewis and the DA chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Police, Ian Cameron, defended their record by attacking Rupert. “He knows full well that the criminal justice system… is in the control of the national state,” the mayor said. Cameron called Rupert’s claim “misleading”. It was “completely false” that the DA controlled the police in the Western Cape, he said, calling for policing powers to be devolved to the province.

The problem with their arguments is that these gentlemen, together with Hill-Lewis’ Mayco member for policing, JP Smith, are better suited to running neighbourhood security companies than developing policy to reduce crime.

Rather than implement policies to integrate the divided apartheid City, to address generational trauma, provide drug and alcohol counselling, and social workers and school psychologists, and plans to clean and beautify areas previously reserved for people of colour, the DA believes it can leave things as they are and contain the violence – if it just had more police powers.

This approach is not dissimilar to that of the State of Israel towards Palestine, with its similar history of apartheid and forced removals. It begs the question, what the likes of Cameron, Hill-Lewis and Smith would do with more powers…

Until the politicians in charge of the City and Province, and many in the media, stop regarding the culture of gangsterism as “normal” on the Cape Flats, Cape Town police stations will continue to record the highest numbers of murders in the country.

Cape Town is among the most beautiful cities, which should be among the most visited cities, in the world. But it remains dangerously close to the epicentre of inequality in the world, including inequalities and disproportionalities in the rate of violent crime.

The politicians’ approach to dealing with social and environmental injustices, many of them inherited from the past, through the lens of policing, renders the City unstable and unsustainable.

* Prior to President Ramaphosa’s delegation to the White House, the GOOD Party argued that Cape Flats residents should be first on the list for refugee status according to the US criteria: Many speak Afrikaans, had their land expropriated without due compensation, and have proper reason to feel trapped by their ethnicity and profoundly unsafe.

GOOD Transport: The party supports improvements in public transport infrastructure.

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