The Law Enforcement Advancement Plan outlines how the City will achieve the objective of boosting its Law Enforcement capacity, as part of the Provincial Safety Plan launched in September 2019.

The City’s Mayoral Committee today approved the Law Enforcement Advancement Plan.

The LEAP plan will guide the City’s efforts to assist the Provincial Safety Plan launched by Premier Alan Winde earlier this year.

In terms of the plan, the City will recruit, train and deploy more Law Enforcement Officers to help combat crime, with the bulk of the funding provided by the provincial government.

Five hundred Learner Law Enforcement officers (LLEOs) will be appointed by 1 February 2020, with 500 more to be appointed by 1 July 2020. The officers will be appointed as peace officers in terms of the regulations issued by the Minister of Justice under the Criminal Procedure Act.

Half of them will be assigned to Neighbourhood Safety Teams in key crime hotspots like Atlantis, Kraaifontein, Phillipi East, Nyanga, Khayelitsha, Hanover Park, Manenberg and Steenberg. The list of key areas will be finalised by the Western Cape Provincial Government, in consultation with the City.

The City has already launched two Neighbourhood Safety Teams in Delft and Bonteheuwel; the capacity of these could be expanded as well.

The rest of the officers will be assigned to bolster capacity within other areas of the City’s Law Enforcement Department to deal with increasing our response capacity to address violent crime and public violence. These additional staff will allow for targeted operations in various areas to help reduce crime and violence in communities not identified for priority deployment as identified above.

The appointments will comprise fixed-term contracts from a pool of officers who have come through the Auxiliary and Expanded Public Works Programmes, and have already undergone Basic Peace Officer Training.

‘Our volunteer auxiliary programme, which we launched more than five years ago, has given us a tremendous advantage, as hundreds of officers have already acquired peace officer training and other practical skills as volunteers, but have also put in many hours on patrol with qualified law enforcement staff, which makes them perfect candidates for advancement. In this way, we ensure that we are recruiting passionate and dedicated people to the service who are strongly motivated to work for safer communities and fight crime,’ said the City’s Mayoral Committee Member for Safety and Security, Alderman JP Smith.

The new recruits will undergo further training on the practical skills required to perform their duties. This will be done through the City’s Metro Police Training College and includes:

Basic Firearms Training

Procedures relating to the handling of dockets and statements etc.

National Road Traffic Act

Powers and Duties

Tactical Street Survival

Staff will be based at existing City and/or Provincial facilities. Provision has also been made to secure vehicles, uniforms, firearms, radios and other equipment that the staff will require to execute their duties.

The Western Cape Government will contribute R1, 297 billion to the project over the next four years.

‘The City will contribute R452 million in total. This is a valuable and timeous expansion of the policing resources which will go a long way to compensating for the loss of SAPS which has seen a reduction of 4 500 officers over the last four years, rendering the national police service critically short-staffed with 85% of stations being under-resourced. While the Provincial Government continues to pursue the inter-governmental dispute with national government to compel the return of more SAPS officers to the Western Cape, the City and Province have found a way to ensure that we make communities safer as urgently as possible.

‘This is a massive undertaking, but the City is committed to making it work, in the interest of public safety. The crime statistics show that we have a lot to do in many of our communities where criminals run rampant, and with no clear indication that the South African Police Service will be bringing extra resources online anytime soon, someone needs to step into the breach, even if it is not our primary mandate,’ added Alderman Smith.

Source: City Of Cape Town