CPF fury at plan to shuffle cop clusters
The Gauteng CPF is enraged by the provincial commissioner’s plans to restructure some of the clusters within the province.
|||Pretoria - The Gauteng community policing forum is enraged by the provincial commissioner’s plans to restructure some of the clusters in the province, saying this step would have negative consequences on service delivery.
The forum’s chairman Andy Mashaile said they were willing to go as far as involving the courts if the decision is finalised without their input.
“We were never consulted about this matter and it angers us because we are representing the communities in this province,” Mashaile said.
Some of the issues raised by the forum include the huge amount of resources and police officers needed for this plan to materialise.
“This will have a big impact on the response time, because some of the clusters will be bigger than normal. This means that police stations will have to cater for more areas than before,” Mashaile said.
“The plan is to recruit some of the officers from the stations to be a part of the management team, but there are no plans to have those officers replaced. This is one of the things that are fundamentally wrong with this plan.”
He said this would stretch the police staff, crippling them with added responsibilities to their duties. “The public will be inconvenienced. This is a service delivery problem and we are willing to get a court interdict to stop this from happening,” Mashaile told the Pretoria News.
He said the forum and the provincial commissioner Lieutenant-General Lesetja Mothiba met to discuss the matter, but failed to agree on the specifics of the plan. “We were not consulted about it. When we met, the PC (Mothiba) made it seem like that was a consultative meeting when it wasn’t. He had made his decision and was merely informing us about it. So this cannot be implemented because the community, which is the biggest stakeholder, was not consulted,” he said.
However, the police cautiously responded to enquiries from the Pretoria News.
Police spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Lungile Dlamini confirmed that plans were afoot, but nothing had been cast in stone as yet.
“The reconfiguration of the clusters is a broader management decision by the South African Police Service for effective service delivery.
“This is currently being discussed by management and the relevant stakeholders and, has not been finalised yet,” he said.
tankiso.makhetha@inl.co.za
Pretoria News