Police arrested 141 wanted suspects in Cape Town over the weekend but minister Bheki Cele says he is aware that gangsters are fleeing the province.
"The gangsters are beginning to spread around. We met one Saturday in another province but we will deal with that," he said.
He was addressing the media at a briefing on Sunday after a crime summit in Paarl over the weekend.
The two-day summit was attended by 500 stakeholders from across the province who engaged with the minister and police bosses to discuss how to address Cape Town's spiralling murder rate and gang problem.
He sidestepped questions around allegations of police corruption in the province by saying that even pastors were implicated in crime and that every organisation had its "bad apples".
"Like all sectors of life police will have their rotten apples. Even churches will have their rotten apples. That's why there is a trial of a certain bishop who kept a 14-year-old child as a sex slave for a very long time," said Cele.
"If bishops go for that, who are the police then?" he said.
He said that during their talk shops over the weekend there were calls for the establishment of special courts for gang-related cases.
Fransina Lukas, chairperson for community policing forums in the Western Cape, said one of the main problems was the release of gang suspects on bail.
"One of the things we asked for in our memorandum was the establishment of special courts. We also asked that there shouldn't be bail for gangsters," she said.
"Especially if they are repeat offenders. We know that bail is a human rights issue but the community is the party that suffers the most when these suspects are released," said Lukas.
She also asked that "stability" be brought back to the police in the province.
"We feel that there are enough police. If you go to the police stations you'll find a lot of police performing administrative tasks, they need to get out of those administrative tasks and into the streets to catch the criminals..
"If the local government with the metro police and law enforcement work with the police, and not in parallel, if they work together they could make a huge impact."
She said that police intelligence was needed to catch the gang bosses who were behind the gang violence.
She said the main talking points during the summit were around the relationship between the communities and the community policing forums and the police.
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