Andy Duffy
Cape Town City Council has pulled the plug on the car-watch scheme it set up in front of its headquarters, after a flood of complaints that its parking attendants were harassing and robbing motorists.
The scheme, piloted early last year and running formally since December, was canned last Friday after the council decided it could not control the attendants or risk being identified with organised pilfering on its own doorstep. Officials are not ruling out the prospect of the council being landed with law-suits from victims who were robbed under the guise of a council-approved parking scheme.
“The number of complaints was out of control,” says Alan Dolby, director of protection services in the council’s traffic department. “The council had hoped this scheme would prevent this sort of behaviour. But we were fighting a losing battle.”
The question of legal liability will have to be “tested in court”, he says.
The aborted scheme ran on Old Marine Road, the 150-space short-stay car park between the civic centre and the railway station. The car park was one of four downtown parking areas identified as part of the council’s Cape Town Cares programme – a joint initiative with business to help the homeless on the streets of the mother city.
The council wanted to train people who hassled motorists for money to look after their cars. Participants were bound to a code of conduct, obliging them to neither hassle motorists nor damage their cars.
The chosen attendants wore yellow vests and caps, and carried cards that introduced them as scheme members who could be trusted and rewarded at the motorist’s discretion.
But the council was able only to bind participants to its code of conduct in two of the identified areas: Old Marine Road and Greenmarket Square. The latter scheme is working well, Dolby says, mainly because it has linked up with wary local traders.
All 20 attendants at Old Marine Road, however, have been sacked. “They were operating as a gang,” Dolby adds. “People would pay them to look after the car and they would come back and the car would be damaged.” Jewellery, handbags and cellphones were also regularly pinched. Dolby now wants to draft private security firms to oversee the city’s car parks.
Earlier this week, former members of the yellow-vest scheme on Old Marine Road were not sure whether they had been sacked. Ebrahim Davids (36), who worked on the car park for nearly a year, says the uniforms were taken away for washing. He says there is no crime in the car park.