Stabilisation Unit Launch – Vision into action

Statement by Dan Plato, Western Cape Minister of Community Safety

The launch of the Stabilisation Unit today marks another successful safety partnership which started from a shared vision with the City of Cape Town and culminated in innovative action towards safer environments where people live, work and move about.

Policing shortages and doing away with more than 5 000 South African Police Service (SAPS) reservists left a serious visible policing vacuum within the City of Cape Town.

This Department of Community Safety partnership initiative has seen the department make R2.5 million available for training, equipment and development in setting up the Community Stabilisation Units and forms part of the larger Safety Partnership initiatives launched in April this year.

The Stabilisation Unit is also an important part and necessary first step in ensuring that the urban transformation unveiled for Manenberg earlier this week becomes reality.

The Stabilisation Units are not the only solution to the problems faced by communities plagued by gangs and drugs, but they will assist the SAPS with extra feet on the ground and eyes and ears in our communities. We, as government, need the communities to partner with us to improve safety in any area.

We need communities to partner with their respective Neighbourhood Watches (NHWs) and their Community Policing Forums (CPFs) to ensure that criminals taken off the streets by the SAPS and the Stabilisation Units remain off the streets.

One way to help ensure that criminals do not return to the communities they have plagued is to collectively petition against bail applications through the CPFs.

We urge communities to assist the Stabilisation Units in their task and use the additional services provided by, for instance, the Safety Kiosks to be handed over to the City of Cape Town for deployment. These Safety Kiosks help to enable effective, stable and efficient law enforcement services almost to the door steps of the communities that they serve, ensuring the availability of call-up systems during incidents such as gang flare-ups. 

Though we start with 90 fully trained, fully equipped Law Enforcement Auxiliary Officers in service of the City of Cape Town, the Department of Community Safety envisage a total of 240 Chrysalis Graduates to be integrated into the City of Cape Town’s Metro Police as Auxiliary Officers.

We envisage more partnerships across the province where we will be able to access and mobilise hundreds of Chrysalis graduates to undertake combined community projects aimed at building safer communities, Better Together.