Residents of De La Haye reacted in shock when an elderly resident received a death threat from a bin-scratcher recently.
The De La Haye neighbourhood watch (DLHNWH) then held a mass operation on bin collection days, stopping as many bin-scratchers from entering the area as possible.
“We decided enough is enough,” says DLNHW’s chair, James Raad.
Patrollers and other volunteers blocked off all the entrances to the area, stopping anyone from entering.
“We just said we were holding an operation and they had to pass by our area.”
Raad says the whole operation was eye-opening for many.
“We found that there are genuine people on the street who lost houses. People who are really down and out and their only way of getting food is from (collecting and selling) cardboard and plastic.”
Unfortunately, however, there were many other people they saw who were using bin days as opportunities for crime.
“Along with these desperate people coming in, there are criminals. I saw people coming in on Wednesday with small backpacks on their backs, no trollies and they had gold rings on. Young guys who were like 25 years old, 30 years old. They just pushed past us. They were so arrogant they would force themselves through.”
Recently in jail
The event was triggered by a threat received by a man (73) who has been living in the area for 35 years and prefers to remain anonymous for fear of retribution.
The man says he is moving to a retirement home and hired a skip last Monday to dump some of the unusable products into, like broken tables.
When he heard his dogs barking, he walked outside and saw two men at the skip, one deep inside, one beside it. The contents lay outside.
“I told them they had to pack the stuff back into the skip, but they ignored me. I then told them if they keep on doing that I’m going to call the police.”
The man went to fetch his phone and started acting like he was talking to a police officer on the phone.
The bin-scratchers reacted angrily and one told the resident he was recently in jail and would come back and kill him.
The resident was perturbed and reported this to his local neighbourhood watch group and was met with shock and numerous other stories of people being targeted by bin scratchers
“What makes me the angriest is that we are given no protection by the authorities,” the resident says.
“We are taxpayers.”
A number of people have told TygerBurger about rising anger in the communities regarding the bin scratchers and street people.
The City is embroiled in various legal battles that prevent them from removing people off the streets, which does nothing to curb the rage.
Raad, the DLHNHW chair, says the whole country’s social welfare system is failing residents. He saw many desperate people on the day of the operation.
One of these men said the area’s crime would only increase because the area was preventing him and others from making a living by collecting recyclables.
Sean McLeland, CPF chair, agrees with the fact that there is a problem with criminality during bin collection days, as criminals seep through “under the auspices of being bin scratchers.”
“We support neighbourhood watches but we must understand (the right to) freedom of movement is important.”
He says more partnership is needed with especially security companies and that the CPF hopes to help roll-out human detection cameras as well as licence place recognition cameras. This will be done in conjunction with security companies.
“They really do work. If you have a number of security companies and neighbourhood watches on (WhatsApp) groups (monitoring alerts from the companies), it creates a huge force of protection for that community.”
