City Neighbourhood Watch Workshop the first step toward a unified Community Crime Watch Forum | Western Cape Government

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City Neighbourhood Watch Workshop the first step toward a unified Community Crime Watch Forum

17 August 2008
Executive Mayor Helen Zille, Cllr Dumisani Ximbi, Mayoral Committee Member for Safety and Security, senior officials from Metro Police, SAPS and the Provincial Government Department of Safety and Security also attended the workshop.

In the workshop the Mayor requested the Metro Police to establish a dedicated unit tasked with liaising with and assisting neighbourhood watches across Cape Town. Its proposed function will be to gather information on crime from citizens, assist with administrative matters and help new neighbourhood watches to be established.

The Mayor also proposed that a task team of volunteers, with the assistance of the City, establish a unified Cape Town Community Crime Watch to act as a support structure for citizens wishing to establish new neighbourhood watches in under-resourced or disadvantaged areas.

The Mayor proposed that the team begin its work with three pilot projects where community members have expressed interest in starting neighbourhood watches (for example, in Manenberg).

"I have been very impressed by the best practice initiatives around Cape Town and I would like to see this extended throughout the entire city" she said.

The workshop included presentations on some of these best practices implemented by community crime prevention initiatives in Hout Bay, Khayelitsha, and other areas in order to assist members of new neighbourhood watches.

The City of Cape Town's Metro Police provided a presentation on building stronger partnerships between City, SAPS and community watches. Included in this was an overview of the City's new computer aided crime response system, its Integrated Spatially Enabled Response System.

As part of this system, a new emergency and crime call centre has been established with computers that immediately indicate a callers' locations on a map, together with the location of all response vehicles.

All information called in can then instantly be sent to newly fitted computers in response vehicles nearest to the reported incident. The system also links each response car to national crime databases and resources, and includes monitors, fingerprint readers and printers. This system is soon to be extended to motorcycles. This system allows for instant processing of crime data, and allows ongoing identification of crime hotspots and traffic problems.

Various other issues around police resourcing and problem areas were also addressed at the workshop.

Issued by:
Communication Department, City of Cape Town

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