Police said on Saturday that they will meet with the business community to expand their presence in Gauteng malls.
”The various stakeholders will be meeting on Monday to discuss further strategies,” provincial police commissioner Perumal Naidoo told reporters on Saturday.
”We will not sit back and allow [criminals] to terrorise our community.”
Naidoo said there would be a larger police presence at Gauteng shopping malls but refused to disclose further details of their plans.
”We might have 20 police officers who are undercover, or we might have one police officer in uniform,” he said.
But Naidoo said malls also had to improve their own security.
”They also need to jack up security at the malls, and we will work with them,” he said.
Naidoo did not discuss specific issues of improvement but said: ”It’s useless to have a [security] camera on the wall that’s not working.”
He also appealed to the community to provide the police with ”eyes and ears” and promised that every tip-off made to police was pursued.
Naidoo told reporters that another two arrests have been made in connection with a robbery at the Trade Route Mall in Lenasia.
”We hope to arrest more individuals and detectives are now looking at their possible involvement in other cash heists,” he said.
The two were arrested on Friday morning in Soweto. They will appear in the Lenasia Magistrate’s court on Monday.
The Trade Route robbery, in which two cash in transit guards were shot, was the most recent in a spate of robberies in Gauteng shopping malls.
Seven shopping malls in the Johannesburg and Pretoria areas have been struck in the past two weeks.
Naidoo said that three arrests have been made in an attempted jewellery store robbery at the Irene Village Mall in Centurion, 10 arrests for a robbery at Rivonia and another two arrests for a robbery at a Pick and Pay in Bracken City.
Police have yet to make arrests for a robbery in Midrand, a cash-in-transit heist at Killarney Mall and a jewellery store robbery in Fourways Mall, where the culprits escaped on motorcycles.
Naidoo called the Fourways Mall robbery ”very well planned, very well executed”. — Sapa