Pretoria - ActionSA has called for Police Minister Bheki Cele to act against the country’s increasing crime figures or face court action.
The message was delivered by party members, led by president Herman Mashaba, who peacefully marched to police headquarters in Pretoria yesterday.
In what was seen as one of the party’s campaigns before the 2024 general elections, Mashaba was flanked by the party’s national chairperson, Michael Beaumont, and all nine provincial leaders.
Addressing the crowd opposite the SAPS headquarters, Mashaba said Cele had been given three months to take action against the failures of police stations across the country, or face legal action to force him to take action.
“As we have seen in recent events in communities across South Africa, our residents are being left defenceless as the police continue to fail to respond to emergencies, or do not have the appropriate equipment,” said Mashaba.
He said during the past week the party compiled a list of some of the most dysfunctional police stations in the country and out of the hundreds of responses received, more than 60% of responses highlighted police stations where telephone lines aren’t working, more than 50% indicated a lack of electricity at police stations during load shedding, and hundreds where the police did not have enough working vehicles.
The party submitted a memorandum of demand, which was accepted by deputy police commissioner General Tebello Mosikili, that action be taken within the next three months to urgently address “the continued decline in the quality of police stations”.
Some of the party’s research revealed that police stations were understaffed, lacked appropriate equipment and vehicles, infrastructure was in dire decay, there were incompetent staff, no electricity, emergency services were not working and the police were not able to open cases.
“The public simply does not trust the police any longer, and they have reason to.
“This failure in police stations is evident in South Africa where the murder rate has returned to 2000s levels after reaching its lowest point in 2012. Sexual violence is on the increase and robbery with aggravating circumstances is reaching some of its highest levels yet.”
In its memorandum, the party demanded that all police stations have access to back-up generation in the event of load shedding to ensure they remain functional; have working telephone numbers that communities can contact in the event of an emergency; that an audit of all police stations be conducted to highlight the number of infrastructure or equipment defects such as broken windows and vehicles; and that a plan be set in place to fix police stations, ensuring that both urban and rural police have access to the equipment they need.
“In a way, you could see this as a campaign for the upcoming 2024 national elections, but the truth is that we have been campaigning from the day ActionSA was born in 2020, and we fundamentally believe that you must fight for votes between elections and not during elections,” Beaumont told the Pretoria News.
“This is another important milestone for us because crime has to be one of the major frontiers for these elections.
“Most parties have given up on the issue of crime and they have come to accept our fate, often because politicians live with private security that keeps them safe, but South Africans continue to live in fear.”
Pretoria News