Stop romancing criminals and enforce the law, Cele tells police

Police minister Bheki Cele has told police officers to stop romancing criminals and enforce the law.

Cele with national police commissioner Gen Fannie Masemola and KwaZulu-Natal provincial commissioner Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi officially launched the high-density Operation Shanela in Durban on Saturday.

“You must enforce the law against those who commit crime. The law must take its course. The bigger law of the country, called the constitution, instructs you to uphold the law and enforce it, so go and do that. Don’t romance criminals.”

Cele said criminals were rearing their heads in the force and urged the commissioner to fight criminality from within. He referenced an incident in Mpumalanga, in which a flying squad BMW was found to contain illegal guns.

“They put illegal guns, illegal everything, to go and run criminality using our own cars and they are members of the flying squad in uniform in the marked car with state resources.”

Cele added that if he were a dictator, he would ensure those within the justice system, including police, magistrates and prosecutors, who broke the law were locked in prisons that do not have TVs or food.

Cele said more than 99,000 suspects have been arrested since the inception of Shanela in May. Through the operation, streets in all major cities will be saturated until Monday morning to “squeeze the oxygen out of criminals” and to ensure all South Africans, especially women and children, are safe and feel comfortable, he said.

“Since we started on May 8 until now, we have arrested 99,754 suspects. What makes me happy is that as I check of late, most of them are still in custody. I wouldn’t know the number, but more than 80% of them are in custody.”

These included people with outstanding warrants of arrest for crimes such as murder, rape, robberies, cash-in-transit heists and other serious crimes, he said. “That’s the kind of people that we arrest.

“Indeed this city of ours is not very much out of the woods when it comes to criminality,” he said, adding that three Durban areas led the pack when it came to serious crimes, with Durban Central always at the top.

Inanda and Umlazi were murder capitals, with the former's police station leading in reported murders, he said.

“This means all of us at the local level, provincial level and national level, we will have to focus on Inanda. We will have to work hard to remove it from that notorious No 1 position.

“We can't have a station that is permanently No 1 when it comes to serious crimes. At a certain given point, they will have to move.”

Cele said KwaZulu-Natal was the leading province for mass shooting incidents.   

“This province leads on mass shootings, this city [Durban] is part of that. If it is not Glebelands Hostel, it is somewhere in the west. We have a problem around the west of Durban. There is a problem. I don’t know who told criminals that is their place and then at the hostels. Both hostels of Glebelands and KwaMashu give us a headache.”

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