On instruction from Premier Ebrahim Rasool, Senior Superintendent Jeremy Veary was made station commander in Mitchells Plain in April this year to head one of the most difficult police stations in the Western Cape.
Mitchells Plain is bigger than Bloemfontein, covering a vast area between the R300 highway and False Bay. It is home to about 1,7-million people — yet it has only one police station. There are only 293 cops — the equivalent of one policeman for 6 000 people — and a mere 70 or so vehicles to police the area.
While Nyanga is the murder capital of South Africa, Mitchells Plain claims the highest number of drug-related crimes — in the past year a staggering 3 700 were reported. Mitchells Plain has the highest incidence of indecent assault, common assault, and robberies and burglaries at residential premises in the Cape.
Veary was hand-picked by Rasool because of his experience and knowledge of drug, gang and crime issues in the Cape Flats.
”I grew up on the Flats. I understand this place intimately and I understand crime here. One of the first things I did was to tell the mothers and fathers of Mitchells Plain that our selective morality is the very thing fanning the crime and violence in this community. The criminals here don’t jump with parachutes from the sky to come and rob and murder and rape us — they’re from here — they’re the sons of the mothers living here. They’re our children,” Veary said.
”I told them you can’t buy stolen TVs and DVD machines but then complain when your taps are broken off and sold for scrap because some youngster needs tik money. Some crimes can’t be OK while others are condemned.”
Veary has had a special relationship with Mitchells Plain. As a school teacher he was arrested here in 1987, charged with terrorism and sentenced to five years in prison. After being jailed on Robben Island for more than two years he was released with Tokyo Sexwale, Jeff Radebe and a host of other leaders. ”It’s right that I’m back here now,” he said.
Veary walked into a situation of rising contact and property-related crime. According to the crime statistics released earlier this month, the national murder rate increased by more than 10%, burglaries by more than 50% and business robberies by 80%.
While formulating his strategy to tackle it Veary identified two distinct aspects of crime in Mitchells Plain: ”I made no assumptions. I studied the stats and saw that, first, it’s an urban legend that the gangs are behind crime in Mitchells Plain and, second, I discovered a very localised pattern to the crime. If you live in Lentegeur, your house will be burgled by somebody from Lentegeur.”
Because the perpetrator and the victim were often familiar with one other, Veary realised that a generic approach to crime wouldn’t help.
”The perpetrators and the crime victims know one another intimately and these people are not gangsters — only 20% of the crime here can be attributed to gang activity. The crime is neighborhood-based. Suspects don’t travel to go to commit their crimes elsewhere — they steal and rob and murder on their own doorsteps. Based on these facts, we developed our crime strategy,” he said.
Veary divided Mitchells Plain into 12 areas, appointed a senior police officer as sector head in each area and formed street committees of mainly female residents who patrol the streets on a 24-hour basis. The result has been the establishment, in only three months, of 1 646 street committees, the single-largest crime-fighting organisation in the Cape.
”I immediately — targeted the mothers of addicts to become members of the street committees — Only when the community [members] start policing themselves can we make a difference here because the crime is so localised. I told them to ring-fence the criminals into the areas and to take back their neighborhoods,” said Veary.
Veary’s policemen started printing flyers identifying addresses and details of drug-dealing houses and distributing them widely. ”If the police know where crimes are committed, they should tell the community because the cops can’t watch these criminals 24 hours a day. It’s not a name-and-shame effort but an attempt to empower the community to take back their streets and parks and open areas.”
Because the tik dealers, manufacturers and users are known and open about their trade, Veary and members of his street committee introduced the ”gellie-staan” method as a way to strangle drug dealers’ business, intercept their customers and eventually force them out of an area.
”We make a big fire in a drum in front of a dealer’s house, get lots of members of our street committee to stand around the fire and interrogate every single person entering and leaving the house. The kids coming and going to buy or sell tik we chase home and we phone their parents. We stay there night after night after night, and by standing there, we throw a spotlight onto that house.”
Veary’s strategy has had some immediate successes. ”We average 500 drug arrests a month — it’s historically unprecedented that parents are calling us about the drug activities of their own children. This is a massive step in the decriminalisation of our communities,” he said.
His biggest challenge is tik. Unlike the other residential areas on the Flats and townships all over South Africa, Mitchells Plain does not have a massive problem with shebeens and people illegally selling alcohol from their homes. But some areas have two, sometimes three, tik houses in every block.
”This drug affects everybody, [everybody] from the young to the very old smokes tik. Last week we helped an 87-year-old whose 75-year-old wife was trying to sell his clothes for tik,” he said.
He said the scourge of tik had changed the character of crime in the area. A tik addict needs about R400 a day to feed the habit. ”The easiest and quickest money is in looting houses of taps, windows, pipes, stealing the mirrors off cars and stealing small things. Addicts break into three to four houses daily to feed their habit and they don’t walk away with the television — they steal small things that are not traceable and that they can easily sell,” said Veary.
Rasool launched an anti-tik campaign last week called ”Tik Off — There is Hope”.
”More than 80% of all the crimes in this area are tik-related,” Veary said. ”And it’s not the gangsters smoking tik. It’s grannies and mothers and school teachers and religious leaders. Fathers and their children smoke tik together. Mothers encourage their daughters to smoke tik because they will lose weight.
Still, Veary’s strategy has been successful. Contact crimes have decreased significantly and, for the first time in five years, the number of house break-ins is declining.
The smokkelhuise of Lentegeur
Lentegeur is just one neighbourhood in Mitchells Plain affected by the ravages of tik.
Last month it was the scene of violent marches by community members after anti-drug campaigner and community activist Abduraghman Sydow was shot and killed outside a tik house. The men arrested for Sydow’s murder are members of the Sexy Boys Gang.
Now residents fear that Pagad’s militant arm, G-force, will try to gain a foothold here by exploiting residents’ frustration with the drugs and the accompanying crime.
”Mitchells Plain, and specifically Lentegeur, is infested with drugs, and we’ve had enough of the unwillingness of the police and municipality and local government to clean our streets of criminals, gangsters and drugs,” said Igshaan Majiet, a resident of Lentegeur.
”We don’t support G-force — most of the Muslims here are law-abiding people who don’t believe that drug dealers should be shot and killed by a hit squad, but we’re unable to stop people’s anger and their willingness to break the law and even commit murder to get rid of the gangsters and dealers on our street,” Majiet said.
The Mail & Guardian accompanied Majiet to his home in Lentegeur this week and counted seven ”smokkelhuise” and three shebeens in a radius of 2km. On every street corner young men hang around waiting for tik buyers.
Majiet’s main concern is the council houses out of which these gangsters and drug dealers operate. ”The city is in the process of transferring these houses to the owners and once that happens, residents have no hope of evicting these people. They sell drugs from these houses; people have been murdered in these houses; girls are raped here; guns are hidden here and we’ve told the cops and we’ve written to the council — and nothing happens. If the houses get transferred, the gangs will have a legal right to stay.”
Cape Town mayor Helen Zille’s spokesperson, Robert MacDonald, confirmed that the city was in the process of transferring thousands of council houses to residents. ”But the mayor is extremely adamant that drug dealers should be kicked out of council property. We have a long list of houses from where residents are conducting illegal activities. We are in the process of evicting these people for dealing drugs on council property. We have a list of 50 houses in Mitchells Plain alone, but the process is chronically slow because we have to go through the courts.”
Twenty-six houses have been identified by the police and are earmarked for appropriation by the council because the owners or tenants are dealing in drugs — five of these are in Lentegeur. — Pearlie Joubert