About 30 hawkers, mostly women, were chased off the streets of Johannesburg during a joint operation by metro police and the South African Police Service in Yeoville on Thursday.
The head of the Traders Crisis Committee, Edmund Elias said: ”The hawkers, mostly elderly women who have been trading here, were terrified when they saw the police van. They just grabbed their stock and anything they could take and ran.”
The manner in which police treated people was brutal, said Elias.
He said some hawkers were not given receipts of the stock impounded during the police raid in Raleigh Street at about 10.30am. These individuals had all tried and failed to make a living in the doomed Yeoville market.
Elias said the committee has taken a decision to initiate High Court action challenging the legality and constitutionality of both the Johannesburg municipal by-laws and the conduct of the Johannesburg Metro Police.
However, metro Chief Superintendent Wayne Minnaar said the raid was part of an ongoing process and that there was nothing brutal about the actions of police officers. They had merely followed normal procedure.
”It was not our intention to be brutal and to intimidate people,” he said.
Yeoville was declared a no-trading area in 1999 because ”there is no market for them to trade”.
Asked whether elderly women had been manhandled, Minnaar said hawkers were treated the same, whether young or old, because this is a restricted area.
”We have to be consistent when applying the law,” he said.
The spokesperson for the executive mayor of Johannesburg, Zandile Nkuta, said it is not the policy of the City of Johannesburg to use force against any member of the public.
”Law enforcement must happen, but it must happen in a humane manner,” she said.
She said disciplinary action will be taken against any Johannesburg officers found to have applied force as alleged by the informal traders. — Sapa