Six thousand crime prevention wardens to be trained in Cullinan
Six thousand Crime Prevention Wardens will spend the next three months on a secluded farm in Cullinan.
Premier Panyaza Lesufi together with the MEC for Community Safety, Faith Mazibuko, attended a ceremony on February 1 to mark the intake of 6 000 newly recruited crime prevention wardens in Cullinan.
These young recruits, who were welcomed by the Gauteng Department of Community Safety, will spend the next three months on a secluded farm in the area where they will undergo gruelling physical and mental tests.
Successful recruit, Thabang Mojafa, said he is excited at the prospect of assisting the country in fighting crime, corruption, lawlessness, and vandalism.
“I made it following the first assessment, now I can undergo full training. I received the advert from my friend, and then we applied, and shortly after I received a call from the Department of Community Safety that my application was successful,” the excited Mojafa recalled.
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He is not intimidated by physical activity as he regularly exercises at home.
The recruitment of the wardens, who will be deployed in townships, informal settlements and hostels, which include 361 wards across the province, forms part of the provincial government’s efforts to augment the efforts made by the police and the metro police departments to intensify the fight against crime and integrate the concept of ward-based policing.
Other duties of all successful wardens will include crime prevention, stop and search, arrests, attending to complaints, maintaining law and order, and traffic control.
Lesufi wants to extend this plan to tackle crime in the province by installing face recognition cameras on every street, deploying a dedicated police vehicle to every ward, and acquiring more than 500 drones.
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Addressing the recruits, Lesufi said when the provincial government conceptualised the plan to recruit 6 000 crime prevention wardens, people laughed and did not believe it was possible.
“We risked our future, we risked government finances for you to be here, so it must not be in vain.
“We had many choices. The first choice was to go to traffic police in all local municipalities and ask them to please add this number, or we could have gone to the SAPS.
“Still, we had this vision to recruit young people with strict orders to go to each ward to fight crime,” Lesufi told the recruits.
“We cannot live in a country where people commit crimes easily. We cannot live in a country where people are kidnapped.
“We cannot live in a country where people can just put up a shack and then an informal settlement, and we cannot live in a country where women are afraid to walk the streets, either day or night.
“We have to stop it, you have that talent, and you will have the resources to stop it,” he urged the recruits.
“I plead with you to make us proud and don’t do things that will humiliate us,” said the premier.
