GOOD Statement by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & Member of Parliament
28 January 2024
DA leader John Steenhuisen wants people to believe that, due to his party’s brilliance, murder in the DA-led Western Cape province is down 40%. In fact, the most recent set of national crime statistics, released at the end of November 2023, recorded a near 11% spike in the provincial murder rate.
Steenhuisen, further, wants people to believe that the province’s private security force deserves specific credit for the alleged 40% gain. In fact, according to a Western Cape Government statement, murders in the province were up 18.6% in areas where its so-called LEAP officers were deployed.
Steenhuisen is shamelessly exploiting peoples’ suffering under grotesque rates of crime to claim a false advantage for his party at the elections.
This is part of the overall DA strategy to present the DA-led Western Cape as exceptional compared to other provinces. In fact, the quality of life of people struggling for resources in the Western Cape is equally miserable and under-resourced as that of their peers in any other province.
Posting on social media yesterday after visiting Soshanguve Police Station, Steenhuisen said the “highly skilled” LEAP officers in the Western Cape “have helped reduce murder by up to 40% in some of the most dangerous neighbourhoods”.
This, he said, compared very favourably to the Gauteng government’s private police force, where the premier: “Took your tax money to buy ill-fitting PEP Stores uniforms for untrained cadres and pretended that they were ‘crime wardens’. What kind of person pulls a drunkard out of a shebeen, gives him a uniform and a weapon, and then unleashes them onto a community?”
Steenhuisen’s remarks, widely distributed on DA and his own social media accounts are, (1.) racist, using the image of a shebeen as a proxy for Black people; (2.) hypocritical, because the two private provincial security forces are equally ill-trained, and were equally illegally formulated, according to the Ministers of Police and Justice; and (3.) deliberately misrepresent the truth about crime in the Western Cape.
In its statement on 17 November 2023, in response to the release of the second quarter crime statistics covering July to September last year, the Western Cape Government was more truthful.
The statement carried the headline: “Western Cape Government disappointed at latest murder statistics…”
In the first paragraph, the DA-led government acknowledges that the murder rate in the Western Cape “recorded a 10.9% increase”.
In the second paragraph, the statement acknowledges that the statistics “confirmed earlier concerns that murder in the Law Enforcement Advancement Plan (LEAP) deployment areas increased overall by 18,6%”.
The truth is that crime is rampant across the country, including in the Western Cape and Cape Town. There is equally little credit to be taken, for elections purposes, by the ANC-led national government or DA-led provincial government. Zero credit, in fact.
Setting up modern-era, ill-trained “kistkops”, as they were called in apartheid days – at enormous cost to the Western Cape and Gauteng governments – offers no real solutions to combatting crime. Such structures, whatever they’re called, are not provided for in the Constitution; they are purely for decorative purpose.
Unless Steenhuisen failed mathematics in Matric, his attempt to present the provinces 18.6% regression as a 40% success, thanks to the LEAP initiative, is a deliberate effort to sell fake news.
Either way, Steenhuisen should retract his remarks.
Media enquiries:
Brett Herron, GOOD: Secretary-General & Member of Parliament
Cell: 0825183264
Email: bretth@forgood.org.za
Janke Tolmay, GOOD: Media Manager
Cell: 0733671223
Email: janke@forgood.org.za