I actually don’t care anymore about the political games I suspect will put a temporary end to gang violence on the Cape Flats soon.
All the right noises are being made by the right people.
Three years ago, Western Cape and City of Cape Town officials launched the Law Enforcement Stabilisation Unit, to tackle gang violence.
Despite this, the crime stats showed murders in Cape Town increased by almost 13%.
So it was encouraging to see Premier Hellen Zille, her successor-candidate Allan Winde and Cape Town’s mayor-in-waiting Dan Plato all singing the same hymn.
Just days after Zille fired a letter off to Police Minister Bheki Cele demanding an increase in police for Cape Town, the minister announced a new gang unit that has already started working, but will officially clock in at the end of the month.
Of course, the obvious question any Capetonian will ask is how 95 cops are going to handle the scale of gang-related crime across the Cape Flats on a daily basis.
That is the wrong question.
I believe the question should be, “how are we going to help them be effective?”
Last week I begged to stop supporting the crime that’s destroying our communities; that we stop buying stolen goods, stop turning a blind eye and stop tolerating petty crime, even from our relatives.
Now I ask that we support whatever resources are being given to the Cape Flats.
I hear Dan Plato when he questions the motives behind Cele’s sudden deployment of the unit.
And I echo his sentiment that this can’t be a temporary gimmick ahead of the elections, only for national government to shut the unit down after.
But I do believe that gang violence are of such proportions right now that we must grab whatever solutions are being offered - even ones we suspect have political motives.
The one caution I do have is that we mustn’t accept normal service delivery as something extraordinary.
We have been deprived of effective policing for so long, that we risk seeing normal, expected policing as something wonderful.
Let’s help these officers clean up our streets.
And then let’s hold national government accountable when they threaten to disband the unit again.