With few resources to aid it, the Cape Peninsula’s visible gang unit battles to bring an end to gang activity
Marianne Merten
The dark alleys of gang-wracked Mannenberg on the Cape Flats resound with a rapid- fire volley of 20 gunshots shortly before 8pm on Saturday night. Gunsmoke is heavy in the air only metres from where the visible gang unit policemen are patrolling.
They jump out of the unmarked kombi, weapons drawn, sprinting towards the shots, crouching around graffiti-marked concrete walls. A man runs away. It is back to the kombi, adrenalin pumping.
This shift of the visible gang unit – eight men and a woman reservist – patrols the entire Cape Peninsula in two vans, from Mannenberg to Mitchells Plain, Elsies River to Bishop Lavis.
Immediately after the attack, one team of four policemen gives chase down the alleys. The radio crackles, the cellphone rings. People are stopped and searched.
The other team radios for a meeting with their colleagues on a convenient street corner. They take a 15-year-old girl, shot in the leg while walking home with her boyfriend, to hospital. A young man has been shot in the stomach.
The search for the shooter is still on. A short while later comes the message: two youngsters have been arrested with a recently fired handgun and a box of extra ammunition. On closer inspection these 9mm bullets turn out to be government issue.
It is off to Mannenberg police station to process the teenage suspects. They say they were born in 1981. That makes them 19 years old. But the policemen shrug their shoulders. “Soon the two will say they were born in 1983,” mumbles one. Being 17 entitles them to be sent to a juvenile detention centre rather than jail.
Official Western Cape police statistics show 44 people were killed and 92 wounded in 153 incidents of gang-related violence in the first four months of this year. A total of 87 people were arrested.
Criminologists estimate between 40% and 60% of serious violent crime in the Peninsula is directly attributable to gang activity. There are an estimated 100 000 gang members in 137 gangs.
Yet the police response seems to be limited to pouring public order police and soldiers into an area after a particularly vicious gang fight, and appealing to residents for information. Gangsters recuperate. Once the patrols end, the shooting resumes.
Since 1997 millions of rands have been spent on much-publicised anti-crime operations Recoil and Good Hope. Their “flush-and-search” procedures, at best, brought brief spells of quiet.
While the provincial government wants community co-operation, it has repeatedly ignored joint initiatives. The 1998 gang commission – a civil society partnership with the government – floundered after provincial officials withdrew support.
Criminologist Irvin Kinnes believes the focus by police and the state on urban terrorism and People Against Gangsterism and Drugs has given established and emerging gang leaders the breathing space to regroup.
‘It’s the money,” says one gang unit policeman. “Mostly [gangsters] don’t work but they must get cash, so they sell drugs and liquor. Because the money is so good they don’t want others to sell in their area. If others move in, that’s when the fighting starts.”
The visible gang unit was established in 1989. Its 54 members, including one woman, are committed to making a difference in the lives of ordinary Cape Flats residents. The majority grew up in the area and still live there.
Reservist Charmaine Februarie (20) regularly goes out with the unit. “They need a woman. They can’t search women. Sometimes when the gangsters are with their girlfriends they give the stuff to the girls. It’s frustrating.”
Many in the unit admit it is difficult to keep up morale in the face of few resources and meagre pay. Everyone has been shot at, many more than once. Several have been injured on duty. They say it is pointless to wear bulky bulletproof vests because gangsters aim for the top of the legs, groin and stomach.
For this they receive a R300 taxable red-zone allowance. Overtime pay is unheard of. They are angry about the thousands of rands paid every month to the extra troops brought to the Cape Flats for special anti-crime operations, as well as their unmarked cars and cellphones.
“Government is wasting money. The out- of-town troops couldn’t even find their way around,” said a senior visible gang unit member. “Just give us another 100 people, let us train them and you’ll see what we can do.”
Everyone in the unit has a solid knowledge of gangsters, their language and changing habits – like the end to tattooing after proposals to make gang membership illegal – and of the alleys and backyards used by criminals to disappear or dump contraband.
Suddenly the van screeches to a halt before two men crossing a deserted field. “Stop! Police!” the policemen shout as they rush up to the two. It is a routine repeated many times over in one shift. The tone is firm but polite and those searched are sent of with a “thank you” or “good night”. One policeman said they tried to be softly spoken “to respect human rights as the bosses say”, but the gangsters just laughed.
The searches are not random. The policemen spot suspicious characters deep in the corners of dark alleys, amid the twilight surrounding the stairs of the multi-storey blocks of flats or in the flicker of fires.
Close to midnight the unit receives a tip-off on the hideout of a suspect in one of last week’s shootings in Kensington, another poverty-stricken area in the Cape Flats. After some discussion the matter is dropped. It would be challenged in court because there is no search warrant.
They decide to look into the whereabouts of a drug dealer who was busted last week. Instead they come across a group of very drunk revellers. One woman’s offer of sex, emphasised as she strips naked, is met with stony faces all around.
At the end of a 12-hour shift in the early hours of Sunday morning, 11 people have been arrested. But then there is a plea for help with a domestic disturbance around the corner of their Bishop Lavis base. Everyone crams back into the vans. A drunken relative is beating others. When the policemen try to intervene, he hits out with a spade, almost hitting a policeman.
Back at base, the plans for Sunday are discussed. As most attention was given to Mannenberg, the target area for the next day is Elsies River. Two local schoolgirls – kidnapped, raped and killed execution-style by teenaged 28s gangsters – were buried a few days before.
The teams will go out again in their two vans with little more than their determination to fight gangsters. Something must change soon, one shrugs: “We are losing it every day further and further.”