The shortage of patrol vehicles and a shortage of 151 staffers has highly impacted on services at Honeydew and Cosmo police stations.
Honeydew station will soon become two stations, but Cosmo is still working as a satellite station from a premise at Honeydew SAPS. Combined, these stations have 548 staff positions but there are only 397 members of staff effectively allocated to the two police stations, leaving the station with 151 vacancies.
During an oversight inspection as part of the DA’s 100-day #GautengPoliceWatch campaign, we discovered that the station only has 84 vehicles for visible policing, detective work, support services and crime prevention due to 23 cars being left in the provincial garage for repairs and 16 vehicles being boarded.
This means in terms of visible policing there are only 5 vehicles for 4 sectors to cover 108 km² when at least 3 vehicles per sector are required.
Crime in Cosmo and Zandspruit is very high and therefore they allocated 3, sometimes 4 patrol cars to work in Sector 4 Cosmo, leaving only 2 cars to patrol the other 3 sectors.
The severely under-resourced Honeydew SAPS is rated as the number 1 station affected by crime in the province merely because it is under-resourced and is carrying the workload of two stations.
The station is rated 12th for reported robberies, 18th for carjackings, 18th for contact crimes, and 2nd in the top 30 most affected stations nationally for community reported crimes.
Furthermore, while the two stations are in the process of being divided into two stations, Cosmo and Honeydew, telephone lines are dysfunctional, cells are not functional, and Cosmo still awaits a new generator before opening.
When arrests are made, suspects must be transferred to Randburg within an hour of the arrest being made.
Despite the station having had 1200 cases per month in 2018 and working in bad conditions, it has managed to reduce the crime rate to around 700 cases per month, but it remains in the top spot for serious crimes.
The DA will be writing to the MEC of Community Safety, Faith Mazibuko to ascertain when the department will provide adequate support to Honeydew SAPS and when the filling of vacancies will be fast-tracked and Cosmo SAPS opened.