The only people who said crime was out of control in the Western Cape were the Democratic Alliance, Western Cape provincial community safety minister Leonard Ramatlakane said on Wednesday.
Ramatlakane was speaking at a press briefing in Cape Town about his ministry’s response to the province’s crime statistics released on Tuesday.
He said calls for him to step down were ”frivolous” and something to which he would not respond.
”The political parties will meet with us in the elections in 2009; for now let me make the statement that the only government in the Western Cape that has dealt very seriously with crime is the ANC government.”
Ramatlakane said that the provincial crime statistics showed a continuous downward trend, particularly around contact crime.
Contact crime saw a 4,3% reduction in the province between April 2006 and March 2007.
He said the media should focus on how contact crime had shown a 28% decrease in the province over the last four years.
Ramatlakane also said that he was ”happy” to see that drug-related crime had increased by 18%. ”We are happy. It tells us that the police are doing their work.”
Ramatlakane said he hoped drug-related crime and the illegal possession of firearms would ”continue to go up” because it meant the police were doing their job.
In view of the recent series of child abductions and murders, the police were seriously considering pressing criminal charges against parents who left their children alone to go drinking over weekends.
”Somehow the parents, the mothers and fathers, have forgotten about their responsibilities,” he said.
Parents needed to make sure there was always a caregiver with their children.
Statistics released on Tuesday for the Western Cape showed murders had gone up in the province by 4,8% and attempted murder by 10,3%.
Rape and attempted rape decreased by 6,9%, serious assault was down by 9% and indecent assault down by 7,9%.
House robbery went up 51,6% and robbery at business premises rose by 79,1%.
Car hijacking was down by 5,6%.
Ramatlakane said there was no ”quick fix” to solving crime in the province.
He said he could not put a timeline on how long it could take to bring crime under control because ”there is no place in the world that doesn’t have crime”.
‘Resist in doing the bad things’
Ramatlakane said that as long as the Western Cape accepted gang culture as a way of life, crime would continue.
It was only when communities were ”conscientised” to ”resist in doing the bad things” that crime would go down.
Also on Wednesday, African Christian Democratic Party provincial leader Hansie Louw said Tuesday’s crime statistics proved beyond any doubt that the Western Cape was by far the most unsafe province to live in.
Louw said it was imperative that leaders from all areas of life started working together to find solutions to the province’s crime epidemic.
However, he said, ””preferably this debate should be taken out of the political arena, because politics have a way of bedevilling good ideas as there is always the possibility of someone seeing this as an opportunity to score politics points”. – Sapa