Cape councillors play Big Brother
City of Cape Town councillors got to play Big Brother when they took control of he CCTV cameras with eyes on Gugulethu.
|||Cape Town - City of Cape Town councillors had the chance to play Big Brother on Wednesday when they took control of newly-installed surveillance cameras with eyes on Gugulethu.
“At the launch of the cameras at the Transport Management Centre in Goodwood today, Councillor [Mzwakhe] Nqavashe and several ward committee members were shown what the new cameras observe and were given a chance to control the cameras themselves,” said the City’s Mayoral Committee Member for Safety and Security JP Smith.
“They were also shown footage of incidents captured by the cameras in Gugulethu, including a vehicle accident involving a minibus-taxi skidding into a private vehicle on a wet road.”
Smith joined Nqavashe, the Gugulethu ward councillor, at the Goodwood Centre - where the Metro Police Department’s Strategic Surveillance Unit is housed - on Wednesday to test out CCTV cameras which went live in July 2015. Nqaveshe had set aside funds for the two cameras from the ward’s budget, taking the township’s overall camera tally to 11.
Apparently, residents had reported a drop in the number of criminal incidents they’d observed in the areas where the cameras had been installed.
In the period January 2014 to August 2015, the City’s Strategic Surveillance Unit detected 577 incidents in Gugulethu.
“Of these, there were 161 incidents of a criminal nature including robbery and assault, 102 suspected drug offences, 116 fires and 104 traffic incidents including accidents and defective traffic lights,” said Smith. “Nine arrests were made.”
Nqavashe said the surveillance - in addition to arrests - enabled them to make certain inferences.
“More than 50 [per cent] of the incidents were detected over weekends,” he said, “We can therefore reasonably assume a link between alcohol abuse and the spike in the number of incidents.”
This gives us an indication of where to focus resources like community policing as well as the kind of public engagement we need to make Gugulethu safer”.
The two new Gugulethu cameras brought the City’s CCTV tally up to 398. Between April and June 2015, 3 189 incidents were recorded, 768 of which were of a criminal nature. These resulted in 113 arrests.
A number of additional cameras were in the pipeline and were scheduled to go live during this financial year.
They would be installed in areas such as Hanover Park, Manenberg, Athlone, Bellville, Langa, and around the Tygerberg Hospital.
ANA