Western Cape gang violence: Winde says current policing model is failing

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JEREMY MAGGS: More than 1 200 murders in the Western Cape in just over four months and despite soldiers and additional law enforcement on the ground, gang violence continues to terrorise communities.

So what is actually going to stop the killing? It has become a very worrying situation.

On the line now, Alan Winde, who is Premier of the Western Cape. Premier, a warm welcome to you. With this level of killing, do you think authorities have lost control of parts of your province?

ALAN WINDE: Absolutely. We are not getting a handle on gangsterism and extortion, and of course, [for] the last few years that’s the added extra crime that is a driver of so many of these shootings, because the extortionists use that component of fear.

This is what I’ve been calling for, for now seven years, is a new model of policing because the current model is not working.

We’ve got a new police minister (Firoz Cachalia), and every time I get a new police minister, I think, well, great, we’re going to actually see something change.

The current acting minister was appointed one year and one month ago, and you get all excited, but then nothing seems to change.

We can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect a different outcome.

We now need to structurally change the way policing happens, and we need to very, very seriously, really support the criminal justice system as a whole, so that we can actually have a much stronger scientific base to fighting crime because the current system doesn’t work.

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JEREMY MAGGS: Premier, you sound very frustrated in this respect. Why do you think your pleas are being ignored at national level?

ALAN WINDE: I’m not exactly sure. Initially, I think it was political – so the Western Cape is now the province that’s asking for something different.

I think that is now changing, because when I go to a lekgotla with the national cabinet, I’m getting the same comment that I make made by the other premiers, specifically Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape, and of course, between those three provinces and the Western Cape, we are the four highest murder provinces.

So absolutely, I am super frustrated, we can’t just accept it. Then we deploy the army and that doesn’t really make a difference.

We make suggestions of how we think it should be managed, but it doesn’t really change. That’s what has got to happen when you’re not succeeding with what you’re doing in the current model.

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In policing, there are new innovations that come through all the time and different innovations in different countries. Let’s go and choose some of those models that are working in other countries and say, well, let’s just try them here. And that’s what I keep asking for.

JEREMY MAGGS: Let’s talk about that new model in just a moment. But you did reference the army. It’s been supporting police through, I think, Operation Prosper, it’s called. They’ve been there since April. Yet by July, Premier, the police minister acknowledged not one gang had been dismantled. That operation is a failure, is it?

ALAN WINDE: Yeah, this is not the first time the army has been deployed. It was deployed in 2019 and if you read all the reports of that deployment, you say, well, where did it work and where didn’t it work? And that was the point of departure when the president (Cyril Ramaphosa) announced it this time.

I said, well, let’s use those lessons. And really, the province feels absolutely excluded when this happens, and I think the communities feel excluded as well.

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You’ve got a force multiplier with some extra boots on the ground. That’s the key difference. But it has a success rate I think in the beginning when that first happens because people feel excited about it, I think that also perhaps scares maybe some of the criminals a bit.

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But then it doesn’t take long until it’s almost as if the criminals’ intelligence network understands the movement of the military far better than even the police and the military system itself.

So then it doesn’t seem to have any effect. So, yeah, it’s the same old, same old. We keep doing the same thing and we don’t learn.

JEREMY MAGGS: In terms of those new models that you’ve referenced, you’ve been arguing for greater investigative powers for provincial and local law enforcement. But what evidence would you have that devolving those powers, Premier, would actually put more gang leaders behind bars?

ALAN WINDE: That’s a component of the overall change that I believe should happen. We should have decentralised policing powers. In other words, provinces have a concurrent power, where now we only have an oversight power in the Constitution.

A concurrent power is, for example, like we have in education. So we have our education department, the education department runs the schools, the national government has a top framework responsibility.

In our case, the national government would have to have maybe the public order police, maybe national government would have the equivalent of an FBI as in the US. But I don’t know if we should follow that exact model.

The model that I prefer is the one that’s run in Germany. We work quite closely with the Bavarian government in Germany as one of our key partners.

It is much more decentralised federal system of policing, where national is the oversight and provincial is where the decisions are made. In our case, national makes decisions, provinces just do the oversight and each province is different.

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So we’ve got high levels of gangsterism, much higher than other provinces, so we would have to have a different approach to policing in murders in our province, say, compared to the Free State. That’s why I believe it should change.

JEREMY MAGGS: One senses, though, that you might be whistling in the wind, because we also know that changing policing powers could take years. Is there anything that you can do now with the powers that you already have to stop more people being killed?

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ALAN WINDE: So we’ve done two things. The first thing is ask for a pilot project and we said, let’s do that in investigative powers. We seem to get a bit of traction and then it falls away.

So we said, that’s why we are declaring this dispute via the city, because we’re showing the national minister that we do have the capacity to do those investigations, and let’s just do a trial.

And we said, let’s do a trial with the firearms that get taken off the street by our own officers.

The second component is not only asking for it, but we’re actually showing it. So for the last few years, the province put R350 million a year into Leap (Law Enforcement Advancement Plan) officers in six hotspot areas. You can see that it does make a difference.

Listen/read: Alan Winde on the Western Cape’s integrated plan to fight crime

Of course, 1 000 Leap officers compared to 15 000, 16 000 police officers is not that much. But when we concentrate those thousand officers in the six crime hotspot areas and then you measure it, we’ve actually had a decline of 29% of the accumulated target crimes.

Target crimes are murder, aggravated murder, common robbery and aggravated robbery. Across the province, we’ve actually had – you wouldn’t believe this – but we’ve actually had a 15% reduction and a 29% in the targeted areas.

But you would never say that because every day there’s another shooting. And, still, it’s 4 000 murders in a year, and that’s the problem.

JEREMY MAGGS: Alan Winde is the Premier of the Western Cape. Premier, thank you very much.

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