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CAPE TOWN – Communities across Cape Town’s sprawling Cape Flats are living in terror as gang violence reaches alarming new heights, with authorities recording 59 murders in just seven days last month.
The deadly surge has prompted angry residents to take to the streets, chanting “One gangster, one bullet” during recent protests led by anti-gang groups in the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods.
“Our communities are fearful,” said Lynn Phillips, an activist with the Cape Flats Safety Forum, at a weekend demonstration. “We don’t have to switch on Netflix to hear gun violence. We sleep, we eat, and we wake up with gun violence.”
Resource crisis hampers response
Municipal safety official Jean-Pierre Smith described the toll as “deeply alarming,” citing leadership battles and turf wars between gangs involved in drugs and extortion as driving factors behind the violence.
“We do have a massive spike at the moment” in a murder rate that already averages about 300 every three months, Smith told AFP during a nighttime patrol through the neglected areas of a city that attracts thousands of tourists to its affluent suburbs just 20 kilometers away.
The recent violence has claimed innocent victims, including a two-month-old boy who died from a stray bullet while inside his home and a 12-year-old girl killed in crossfire.
Inadequate police response
During Smith’s late-night patrol through Lavender Hill suburb, police wound through streets where children played outside cramped apartments. Officers conducted random searches, seizing bottles of codeine-based cough syrup from one vehicle and detaining the driver for questioning.
In the absence of adequate intelligence gathering, police have resorted to searching all men of “gang age” – typically late teens to around 25 years old, Smith explained.
“There is a known deficiency in the ability of the police to detect crime, investigate it and drive prosecutions,” he said, noting that just two to three percent of gang-related murders in the Cape Town area result in convictions.
Community frustration mounts
The inadequate response has left residents feeling abandoned. Tanya Ruyters, 55, whose son was allegedly shot by a gangster outside a courthouse, expressed her anger at the situation.
“The police do nothing here… and they are disrespecting the people,” Ruyters told AFP as her son’s body lay covered nearby.
Smith acknowledged the challenges facing law enforcement: “Detectives are massively overloaded, with massive case volumes, too many to reasonably handle.”
Meanwhile, “the gangs are getting more sophisticated,” he added, explaining that criminal organizations are using their growing wealth and experience to corrupt judges and police officers.
Within South Africa’s national murder rate of approximately 63 killings per day during the first quarter of this year, the Western Cape province – which includes Cape Town – records the second-highest number of homicides, according to police statistics.
Cape Town districts also grappling with deadly clashes in the minibus taxi industry hold the country’s top five spots for murder rates.
Life in the war zone
In Lavender Hill, less than five kilometers from the sandy beaches of False Bay, resident Mark Nicholson lives near a plot known as “the battlefield” due to its history as a gangster killing ground.
Nicholson has lost seven relatives to gang violence in three years in his suburb, one of several areas created decades ago when the apartheid government forcibly relocated “Coloured” people from the city center.
“When I see a young boy laying dead and he’s been shot, I cry because we’ve been through this,” he told AFP.
Rather than confronting gangs directly, Nicholson runs a project aimed at getting youngsters off the streets and into sports. “My fight is not against the gangsters,” he said. “I need to change these children’s lives so that they don’t get trapped into the violence.”
Others are demanding more aggressive action. A breakaway group within People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD) – an organisation that targeted gang leaders for assassination in the 1990s and whose leaders have been previously imprisoned – has called for army deployment.
“We need to give a clear message to those gangsters that we are no longer going to allow their lawlessness to control our communities,” said PAGAD G-Force representative Zainoneesa Rashid ahead of the latest protest.
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