Letter: Co-ordinated response would be best

Walter Schotter of Ballito writes:

Firstly, I would like to commend the originators of the plan to tackle crime in at least being proactive and coming up with ideas on how to curb and rid the area of a scourge that is slowly eating at the heart of society in SA (‘Residents hope to unite community against crime’, Courier, July 26).

However, I agree with George Gray that this would infringe on people’s freedom of choice (‘Crime plan will infringe on citizens’ rights’, Courier, August 9), and sorry to say create a monopoly.

I am not a fan of the term rights. Rights as an entitlement is a huge problem with modern thinking and society. I prefer the term obligation.

If everyone took care of their obligations and rather do than take, then rights are naturally taken care of.

So, to the crux of the matter at hand though, crime, a huge issue.

Many moons ago I submitted a proposal to set up and have a central call centre for the region with all service providers connected to it, this would allow for a coordinated approach to patrolling and pro-actively tackling issues such as crime in our area.

However sadly no one wants to share control of their individual kingdoms, therefore it just was never considered and/or taken further.

This to me is still the only answer and in this way the various security companies, SAPS, Crime Prevention/Traffic etc would have vehicles stationed more evenly across the whole area.

We pool all resources together and co-ordinate the patrols in the area, making sure everywhere is covered and yes, if that means that someone must respond to an incident at a competitor’s client, as they are the nearest first responder, so be it – the aim is to combat crime.

What would be required is simply a small fee from the community to cover the costs of the manpower to operate such a control room and the cost of its setup.

I would go as far as to incorporate the neighbourhood watches and the less fortunate areas in our community into the setup, where we help to train and skill up some members to patrol their regions but at least knowing they have a central point to get in touch with, that has access to all services and can therefore attend to any given situation expeditiously and efficiently.