Army expected to stop Operation Lockdown on Cape Flats at month-end

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Cape Town - The much-vaunted Operation Lockdown - a crime-fighting co-operation between the police, army and other law enforcement agencies - will wrap up at the end of the month after the army withdraws from the Cape Flats. According to Police Minister Bheki Cele, President Cyril Ramaphosa is to make a decision to suspend or extend the contract but he was not sure what would happen thereafter. Cele said he would engage with Defence Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula on the matter. But Mapisa-Nqakula said they would not be extending the operation and said SANDF members would go back to their previous units. Operation Lockdown was initiated in July last year as a response to the plea for intervention from communities regarding serious and violent crimes plaguing the Cape Flats and other townships in the Cape Town metropole. The force included units of the police, metro police, traffic officials and the SANDF. The operation began its second phase on September 16 last year after President Ramaphosa made an announcement on the extension of its stay until March 31.

Premier Alan Winde said: “When we called for the extension of the army’s deployment in September last year, it was with very clear conditions that measurement tools needed to be put in place to track the impact, and that deployment was done in a co-ordinated way to customise the response to specific areas. It is unclear to us whether these conditions were ever put into place.”

Winde said without knowing the impact of the army deployment, they could not make pronouncements on what should happen going forward.

However, he said the army deployment was only ever meant to be a short-term solution and as a province, “we have been working on interventions knowing that the SANDF would eventually leave.

“We now need to move towards normalisation, because our primary concern is for the safety of our communities. We developed the Western Cape Safety Plan which focuses on law enforcement on the one hand, but also on violence prevention on the other.”

The provincial acting chairperson of the Community Policing Forum (CPF) board, Fransina Lukas, said the suspension of the operation was not good news for crime-ridden and gang-infested communities in the province.

Lukas said the presence of the army as a force multiplier “really assisted in deterring criminals”.

Delft CPF chairperson Charles George said: “We should use technology to fight crime.”

Community Safety MEC Albert Fritz said: “The Western Cape government will continue to roll out the Western Cape Safety Plan.”

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