United Public Safety Front
Introduction
TOWARDS A UNITED PUBLIC SAFETY FRONT!
March separately Strike Together!
1. Introduction
The time has come for the community of the Western Cape and indeed the country to pause and press the reset button on policing. We have arrived at a moment in history where the people affected by gutter policing service delivery should unite. We should unite against poor public safety commitments from politicians, political parties and the police!
We deserve better. Our people in the poorest sections of the Province deserve better. We deserve better policing service, we deserve better protection and we deserve better respect from our police. As people affected by poor policing and profoundly corrupt police officers’ actions, we have come together to change the course of public safety throughout the Province.
The year 2017 will go down in history as the eruption of one of the most violent in the history of the Western Cape province with respect to armed, organised violence by gangs. The murder rate in province have increased by 2% from 3224 in 2015/16, to 3311 in the 2016/17 financial year. Similarly, robbery with aggravated circumstance has increased from 23 732 in 2015/16 to 24 032 in 2016/17. Common robberies have increased from 12 485 in 2015/16 to 12 574 in 2016/17. In releasing the crime statistics, our communities are told by the Minister of Police that other categories of violent crime are all showing downward trends. These crimes include sexual offences, attempted murder, assault with the intention to inflict grievous bodily harm and common assault. Out of a total of 19 016 murders in the country, the Western Cape accounts for 17.4% or 3311 murders.
While the statistics tells us one thing, the experiences of our people in communities across the province tell us something else. That is that violent armed, organised crime is increasing with devastating effects across our communities. Enough of statistics. We need a new vision for policing our communities across the province that will increase our public safety and take policing firmly into the 21st century!
1.1 Vision
The vison of the United Public Safety Front is Unity, Hope and Opportunity for all. This forms the basis of ensuring public safety in our communities.
We believe that the state has a constitutional obligation to provide safety and protection to its citizens. It has failed in its obligation to protect the safety of its citizens as required in the preamble of our Constitution: All citizens are equally protected before the law. In the United Public Safety Front, we will uphold the values of Commitment, Caring and Courage.
We as UPSF will resist the social engineering of our communities by government by playing a facilitation role to capacitate our people especially our youth e.g. entrepreneurial development etc. We further believe that in order to create safety in our communities, the safety of women and children is essential and necessary as an indicator of our public safety.
The United Public Safety Front believes that in order for government to work effectively with communities, all three tiers of government must, when interacting with communities:
• Be participatory in all communications with our communities;
• Seek consensus in communities, instead of dividing it;
• Be Accountable;
• Be Transparent;
• Be Responsive;
• Be effective and efficient;
• Be equitable and inclusive; and
• Follow the rule of law.
We believe that our interaction with government will follow the same principles and we believe that government must work in such a fashion that unites communities against violence.
2. Background and context
We firmly believe that the violence meted out by gangs and police alike have no place in a modern democracy. Our people have suffered enough and the efforts of our community police forums have only seen that the police have not taken our proposals to protect our communities seriously. The community goodwill to help and support the police do their jobs have instead been met with ridicule, laziness and unprofessional conduct of police officers. We believe that in order for the communities to receive professional safety services across the province in all communities, something drastic must change in the structure, attitude and ethos of the police.
This is against the background of violent gang-fights that have erupted across the urban areas of Cape Town and the rural areas of the province. Gangs are responsible for about 79.1% of murders across areas such as Ravensmead, Bishop Lavis and Steenberg. Nyanga and Guguletu has seen an increase of murders in their areas as a result of gang violence. In total gangs have been responsible for 19.1% or 639 murders across the Cape Flats. The recent war between bouncers in Cape Town nightclubs has shown that the gangs has penetrated the urban areas of the inner city and now affects all of Cape Town’s nightlife. Most of the communities in the Southern and Northern Parts of the City are now affected by gang violence and armed, organised gangs.
A state of undeclared war has existed in the Hanover Park area for the last one and half years.
Rural communities such as Worcester, Oudtshoorn, Saldanha Bay, George, and New Orleans in Paarl and Cloetesville in Stellenbosch have all been on the receiving end of violent gang attacks.
Over the years on the Cape Flats, there have been period of intense wars between rival gangs who have branches in the affected communities. Many of our people have died and have been injured as a result. There have been a number of gang fights over a twenty-year period on the Cape Flats which has left many communities in disarray. The gang fights that have started in 2017 have seen the vast majority of communities affected by the violence and have caused major trauma to children, parents and communities.
Gang fights have spiked, migrated from community to community; depending on which gangs are fighting; or worst of all; involved multiple gangs in multiple settings and communities, as is the corruption exercised by police officers.
3. The need for a Broad Front
The time has now come to take our history into account when responding to the violence that has affected our communities. While in the past we have co-operated with the police and law enforcement authorities, this time we must ensure that our participation and co-operation with the police is conditional. It should be conditional on the law enforcement agencies playing their part in working with communities in a professional manner. Currently they are not and on the contrary, are causing more violence and disorganising our communities.
What is clear is that the law enforcement agencies have not been able to challenge the governance exercised by gangs across the province. We are seeing the majority of communities are affected by armed, organised violence where the gangs and corrupt police officers stand united against our communities. What is more is that violent vigilantes PAGAD have started to resurface, causing further violence through their fascist methods. Together, the corrupt police officers, violent gangsters and violent vigilantes have no place in our communities. They do not speak on behalf of our peace loving people and communities. This requires a united response from all our affected communities.
We have seen that the state and its developmental agencies have laid the foundation for the disorganisation of our communities. They dictate which programmes must be implemented by which agencies, we are seeing the death of many of the NGO’s and CBO’s that have relied on government funding for community programmes. The time has now come to sweep away that type of governance and we have to bring together the largest networked community structure that the province has ever seen. This includes all community structures such as NGO’s, CBO’s, CPF’s, CSF’s, religious organisations, business organisations, sports, art and culture organisations where ever we live. It must unite the largest section of our people, coloured, black and white; rural and urban; Muslim, Christian and Jewish; small and informal business formations and the largest section of poorest of the poor.
The Front must be based on the broadest possible unity. It as a working principle be inclusive. It should not exclude people and organisations that subscribe to the principles in our Charter. Disunity in our communities should be the enemy of our people and only benefit the merchants of violence. We unequivocally reject any attempt to divide us on the basis of political division as we know that our front can easily be split by opportunistic political parties. We therefore pledge that while we all have different political persuasions; we will unite around defeating crime in all its forms. We pledge to keep narrow political divisions out of our Charter.
We further recognise the value of all people’s need for peace, development and jobs. To this end, we will continue to organise our people wherever they are to organise for peace, jobs and development. We know that the development of our communities cannot depend on the bankrupt governance processes initiated by the local, provincial and national government. Our turn is therefore to work towards public safety for all our people, which is in the rallying call of our communities.
We pledge to support the work of the United Public Safety Front in order to achieve public safety, peace, jobs and development.
We believe that it is time to organise ourselves, learn from each other and unite the broadest sections of our people to fight all forms of violence, visible and invisible.
4. Armed, organised violence
We are against all forms of violence meted out to communities and taking place within our families across our communities. We see daily violent attacks, robberies, rape and murder taking place in all our communities. We are particularly worried about the organised armed form of violence that are perpetrated by organised gangs. In particular, we are united in campaigning against the violence that they exact on our people. They have facilitators in the form of corrupt police officers who sell their weapons to these gang members.
The only way to turn the attention of government away from their primitive programmes is to challenge the manner in which they interact with communities, by organising our communities. We recognise that we have a great deal to learn from ourselves. We need to learn from each other’s communities in order to combat the out of control gang violence.
To this end, the United Public Safety Front will locally organise itself to learn the best methods in fighting such armed, organised violence from each of its constituent parts and international community initiatives. We will also educate ourselves about the hidden and invisible forms of violence taking place everywhere in our homes, communities and country. We pledge to eradicate and work towards exposing such forms of violence and its effects and impact.
4.1 Understanding Invisible Forms of violence
Long before we see visible violence and gangsterism manifest, an invisible process of violence is at work to produce the visible violence we see.
If we want to make a real difference with regard to the warfare generated by individuals and gangs, we also need to pay close attention to preventing and reducing invisible aspects of violence which is symbolic, structural and psychological in nature.
This needs to be part of any discussion about gangsterism and violence in society. As a start, a framework which was ground-truthed and calibrated by a transdisciplinary group of people can be used to deepen understanding about invisible/visible aspects of violence rooted in South Africa’s history of inequality and violence. The guide can be found here:
https://www.academia.edu/31024697/OPEN_GUIDE_TO_A_DEEPER_WIDER_AND_LONGER_ANALYSIS_OF_VIOLENCE
5. Law Enforcement, Policing and Corruption
The United Public Safety Front will campaign in all areas of the country to change what policing and law enforcement means to people. We have seen the effects of the type of policing in poor areas of the Western cape and in other areas in the country. The first operational response of the police is to meet violence with violence. We reject this primitive form of policing because it directly contributes more violence in our communities, visible and invisible.
We firmly believe that the policing and law enforcement agencies in its current form and structure poses the greatest threat to our young democracy by not delivering the safety services, so urgently required by our people. As the face of government, the delivery of second rate policing services to our communities contributes to the increased levels of violence, frustration and public order protests we see on a daily basis in our country.
Over the last twenty years we have given the police the benefit of the doubt when it came to working and collaborating with them in our community police forums. What has it delivered? Increased safety? Instead we have seen the growth of increased gang violence, corruption of police officers, and more children being killed as a result of police inaction on gangs.
In order for us to work to see progress and development in the policing of our communities, we have to give our communities a direct say in the policing of our areas. If we want to see safety, peace and development in our areas, we require professional policing. We will not get that from the police and law enforcement agencies when we have politicians urging them to continue with violent methods against our communities. This is disrespectful of our Constitution. When politicians exhort police to take off the gloves, we only see then brutalising of our young people. We see specialised units exact brutality not to the gangsters, but against innocent young defenceless men and women on the periphery of the gangs, driving them firmly into the arms of gangs.
Law enforcement and police officials who are not corrupt are in the majority in the policing institutions and that is why the United Public Safety Front will ask for them to take firm action against the corrupt officers. We cannot expect the men and women who collaborate with them in the Community Police Forums (CPF’s), Community Safety Forums (CSFs) and street patrollers to continue to collaborate with the police until they clean out the police force of corrupt police officers and law enforcement officials.
Our communities will call for a pause, a stop to working with police officers and stations who have not lived up to their own oath and professionalism and have instead delivered poor service to our communities. We reject working with such corrupt officers.
6. Community Action: CPF’s, NHW, Street Committees and Street Patrollers
The efforts of the CPFs, CSFs, neighbourhood watches (NHWs) and street patrollers have come to nought as the police have not been able to harness the creative energies of our people to effectively fight crime. Instead, the police have seen these structures as a means to extend their own governance processes of our communities.
Many of our people have been shot in the course of walking the night to secure our safety. We have not seen a requisite response from the police to support these structures, instead they (together with provincial government) have used the structures to cause divisions in our communities.
We believe that crime prevention is not the sole role of the police alone and we know that it has been our efforts as community structures to fight crime that has helped to keep our communities safe. We are equally concerned that the police view our collective efforts to fight crime as wanting to take over the job of the police. That is the view from infantile police thinking.
We will not participate with the police until we are able to redraw the boundaries of working with the police and encouraging police professionalism, dedication and respect for our communities.
7. The tasks of the present period
There are a number of tasks we pledge to undertake. Firstly, we will be convening a mass Public Safety Summit in February 2018. In this Summit we will make a public call for all CPFs, CSFs and NHWs to cease co-operating with the police (SAPS and Metro Police). We note that this is a tactical withdrawal from participating with the police I order to unite our people. We want to make a call on the police to go back to the drawing board when it comes to engaging and respecting our communities.
Secondly, we aim to encourage and build the maximum unity between our people, all our people. This includes urban and rural communities, formal and informal businesses, the religious communities, education sectors, housing, health, youth and development sectors. We will make a call for building unity based on the acceptance of the programme of the UPSF which will be developed at the Public Safety Summit in February 2018.
8. Towards a Public Safety Summit
All communities are urged to elect representatives to attend the Public Safety Summit which will be held in February 2018. We intend to bring together representatives of about 1000 CPFs, CSFs, NHWs, Street Patrollers and NGOs and CBOs working together in all others sectors in housing, health, education, religious, business and safety sectors.
The Public Safety Summit will bring together a diverse cross section of our communities across the Western Cape Province. It will chart the course for further action by our people and elect a provincial leadership. Much of the input work into the Summit will be done prior to the Summit and organisations are urged to develop draft policing in a number of areas which will be up for discussion at the Summit.
The policies which will be adopted at the Summit will assist all structures to collectively work on a joint platform and a joint programme of action.
It will also be adopting a draft constitution to enable the organisation to set the agenda for policing and development.
9. Public Safety, not the “Whole of Society”
The United Public Safety Front will stand together with Public Safety as our public position when it comes to dealing with crime. We argue that public safety is inclusive as it affects all people in our country and helps places development through safety at the top of the agenda. We do not agree that the policy adopted by government called the “whole of society” approach. We cannot see how this approach of a “whole of society” fighting crime, when there are people are supporting criminals. These criminals are in government departments and in the police and they are co-operating with gangsters.
We therefore hold our own view of defending public safety in our community. Public safety demands that we hold government departments to account and we cannot support of a whole of society approach when government departments, particular the police and metro police are not being held to account for the corruption. We firmly believe that this approach of “whole of society” is short sighted and have been developed by people who do not have the best interest of our communities at heart.
Our clarion call is public safety for all. Our constitution calls for safety of all of our peoples and we believe that we will work to achieve this.
10. Political neutrality
The United Public Safety Front will adopt a politically neutral stance. We believe that while all our members have political positions on matters, we will not endorse the views of any political party, but use the best policies, developed by our members. We know that by taking political positions will undermine the UPSF activities and campaign for maximum unity.
We are conscious that there are political positions by our members and we will not prevent individual members from expressing their political persuasions and positions. However, for the purposes of organisational effectiveness, we will not take political positions on any controversial issues that could divide our members.
11. Programme of the UPSF
To be decided by the Community Public Safety Summit in February 2018.