DEAR Editor,-
In the front page article in last week’s Herald, the reporter says we should get involved and take joint responsibility for the state of our town. The points noted are ‘Illegal Dumping’, ‘Vandals wreck Margate beachfront’ and ‘Thieves steal power cables’. From 1994 to 1999 various private individuals created forums to get involved in assisting HCM with all of the above-mentioned issues.
Among the committees were the Margate Police Forum (under station commanders L Slabbert and Morris Moodley) and the CPF, and one by one these structures were dismantled when they got too close to the truth.
Mostly they were labelled racist when the request was made for better policing.
I photographed six cars parked illegally in front of the Wimpy and Mugg and Bean in Margate. When money was required for the CCTV camera infrastructure, businesses came to the fore and the required funds were collected in no time at all. These cameras are sometimes functional and sometimes not.
Servicing has been haphazard and intermittent.
All the woes of Margate, including decreasing property values, empty shops, vandalism and rampant prostitution, stems from ineffective policing. The photo merely depicts a small sample of the lack of effective policing by traffic wardens and HCM law enforcement officers. Other behaviour that goes unchecked is drinking in public and vandalism.
Numerous advances have been made to extend the powers of private security companies and all have been rebuffed.
The future of Margate lies in the hands of the councillors and officials of Ray Nkonyeni Municipality to invite all role-players to a security indaba, with more than lip service being paid to security experts. It will require a genuine commitment of listening to the people in the know, to adopt a ‘Zero Tolerance’ attitude to policing and effect arrests for any breach of the law (as in the New York ‘broken window policy’). Only then can businesses begin to mend the problem and rebuild the shattered economy of Margate.
TONGUE IN CHEEK
Editor: All good points. Please take note, Ray Nkonyeni Municipality. More of this please, dear readers and fellow South Coast residents.
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