Military deployment in Cape Town

[Citizen X]

I support the DA’s call for the military to be deployed in cape Town to deal with drug lords and gangsters.
1. I also support the deployment of the military in all Provinces of SA to deal with crime and serve as a deterrent to heavily armed criminals;
2. In Lenasia, we have a situation of repeat violent and forcible crime on the same businesses and houses. It’s clear, the police do need help, they can’t win this fight on their own. To illustrate, we’ve had numerous ATM bombings here in Lenasia. The first response, is your typical police van which has 2 policemen. One armed with a service pistol and his colleague with a service pistol and some automatic rifle. Some security car will also respond, with one occupant with 1 pistol. Now, in stark contrast, you have a gang of heavily armed men, who have 2 to 3 high performance cars and are armed with ak 47’s r1 or r5 rifles. There do things in military style i.e. about 5 of these heavily armed men, positioned at various points on the road and sidewalks waiting for the police to arrive. The rest attend to the actual crime and deal with whatever resistance they receive their. The results are clear, the criminals are winning and getting away and the police and security are wounded or killed;
3. The military has specialized armor plated and bullet proof vehicles, they also have an array of special weapons. They equipped to deal with such an armed gang;
4. These heavily armed gangs are brazen because they know the police and security don’t have the specialized weapons and vehicles to deal with them;
5. We not in a state of war! What is our military really doing every day! They should be deployed on a permanent basis. They will serve as a deterrent as these armed gangs will think twice;
6. You must appreciate that there is a difference between a terrorist and a criminal where the former doesn’t care whether he lives or dies and has no pecuniary financial motive for his acts whereas the latter cares very much that he lives and has the motive of money, he wants to live to spend such money. If criminals become aware that they will be met with heavily armed response from soldiers, police, security companies and certain legally armed residents as one force, I doubt they’ll even try!

[Blurock]

The military was deployed there last year, but now it has become a political issue and the ANC will not approve anything initiated by the DA. To hell with the people, as long as we can score political points!

[Petrichor]

Was the deployment of last year successful?

I reckon a once-off exercise is not going to do the trick, they need long term solutions, including education, job creation and the likes, which is not treating symptoms, but causes.

However, I do also agree that the reason for rejecting deployment of the army is mainly about their absolute rejection of anything DA

[Citizen X]

Crime is out of control! The Goverment has a Constitution obligation to protect us! In these past 3 weeks here in Lenasia, there have been several violent armed robberies, just last week, there was a huge shoot out between police and armed robbers of a house. It reached a point where 1 robber was corned by police and residents so he decided to shoot himself. We are very easy targets, the criminals know the police and security alone can't deal with them, the army has the resources!

[vieome]

New York once had the highest crime rates in the world, the tried a heavy police presence, but that did not work. They tried heavy prison sentences but that did not work. What did work was a clean up of the areas, removal of grafiti, replace broken windows, a good and through clean up of the city. Seems people who live in cleaner areas build a better moral attitude. You can read full story here at the open university blog.
Extract :Twenty years ago most criminologists and sociologists would have doubted that a metropolis could reduce this kind of crime by so much. Although the scale of New York Citys success is now well known and documented, most people may not realize that the city’s experience showed many of modern America’s dominant assumptions concerning crime to be flat wrong, including that lowering crime requires first tackling poverty, unemployment and drug use and that it requires throwing many people in jail or moving minorities out of city centers.

Instead New York made giant strides toward solving its crime problem without major changes in its racial and ethnic profile; it did so without lowering poverty and unemployment more than other cities; and it did so without either winning its war on drugs or participating in the mass incarceration that has taken place throughout the rest of the nation.

[IanF]

New York once had the highest crime rates in the world, the tried a heavy police presence, but that did not work. They tried heavy prison sentences but that did not work. What did work was a clean up of the areas, removal of grafiti, replace broken windows, a good and through clean up of the city. Seems people who live in cleaner areas build a better moral attitude. You can read full story here at the open university blog.
Extract :Twenty years ago most criminologists and sociologists would have doubted that a metropolis could reduce this kind of crime by so much. Although the scale of New York Citys success is now well known and documented, most people may not realize that the city’s experience showed many of modern America’s dominant assumptions concerning crime to be flat wrong, including that lowering crime requires first tackling poverty, unemployment and drug use and that it requires throwing many people in jail or moving minorities out of city centers.

Instead New York made giant strides toward solving its crime problem without major changes in its racial and ethnic profile; it did so without lowering poverty and unemployment more than other cities; and it did so without either winning its war on drugs or participating in the mass incarceration that has taken place throughout the rest of the nation.

There is another argument that legalised abortion played a role in this.

"We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly eighteen years after abortion legalization. The five states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime."[1]

link to wikipedia for more. Has legalised abortion in South Africa brought down the birth rate?

[Justloadit]

Has legalised abortion in South Africa brought down the birth rate?

No, because all young women who get pregnant and give birth to a child get a social grant for the child, so what do you think is gonna happen?

[vieome]

There is another argument that legalised abortion played a role in this.
link to wikipedia for more. Has legalised abortion in South Africa brought down the birth rate?

Thanks for this post, well the thing is I guess a clean up and the legalization of abortion helped bring the crime rate down in New York. SA has done one of these two factors now they need to do the other the clean up.

[Blurock]

All over the world the "do gooders" have very good initiatives, but unfortunately in some cases they do more harm than good. Social programmes should be planned and implemented holistically to prevent a solution causing another problem.

Fort example; access to better medical facilities and medicines has lowered the infant mortality rate in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Mosquito nets have also assisted in lowering the mortality rate from malaria. This is good, but now the children are dying of hunger, because not enough has been done to supply food to the increasing population.

[Mike C]

The way I read the article that vieome referred to is that it was NOT the cleaning up of the neighbourhood but police presence that made the difference.

Nevertheless, a close look at the data after 2000 does point to the importance of policing. In spite of the loss of 4,000 officers, the most recent period still has substantially more police on the street compared with 1990.

Had the city followed through on its broken-windows policing, it would have concentrated precious resources in marginal neighborhoods rather than in those with the highest crime. In fact, the police did the opposite: they emphasized ‘hotspots’ a strategy that had been proved effective in other cities and that almost certainly made a substantial contribution in New York.

[Citizen X]

Thanks for this post, well the thing is I guess a clean up and the legalization of abortion helped bring the crime rate down in New York. SA has done one of these two factors now they need to do the other the clean up.

Vieome, you raise an interesting perspecitive! we do need a general clean up back to basics operation. My problem though is simply this: In trying to do just that every holding cell in South Africa has acussed arrested for loitering, and public indecency. To arrest these people appears to be no challenge but the heavily armed atm bombers is quite a different scenario! We need military back up!