Less ostriches, more eagles in Police, please

| Wednesday July 2, 2014 07:00

At a quarterly briefing on crime in Gaborone last week, police announced that their “ongoing task team operations had reduced crime in and around” the capital city. Disregarding the air of disbelief such a statement would naturally trigger, the senior officer in question soldiered on, declaring a reduction in violent and intrusive crime.

“This is an indication that the police are diligently doing their work,” the senior police officer announced, while noting that investors preferred Botswana as a destination of choice due to its safety and security. Within that last statement, the aforementioned motivations are patently clear.  The “reduction of crime” update was likely intended to “demonstrate both control and mastery of the situation” or “assuage foreign investors fears”.

Sadly, evidence in support of this supposition is painfully abundant in and around Gaborone. Any resident of Gaborone over the past two years will testify to the dramatic increase in violent and intrusive crime, alongside an uptick in perennial vices such as cellphone theft and burglaries.

For a period last year, the city was held captive by a band of armed robbers who struck several businesses and homes with bloody callousness, while police were slow off their marks to arrest the situation. As the city has grown, new locations such as Block 10, Block 8 and others where construction continues, have become the hotbed of violent attacks by intuitive criminals emboldened by loopholes within our systems of law and order. Where some of these criminals have been nabbed, the judicial system has further let Batswana down by granting some of these individuals multiple bails, due in part to the absence of proper record keeping on past/pending offences. The first quarter of this year has not been any better, with filling station stick-ups turning into a pastime for some of these criminals, while innocent homeowners sleep with an eye open for the almost inevitable break-in. If crime has gone down at all – which we strongly doubt – it must simply be coming off its record highs in 2013, which is cold comfort to the residents of Gaborone who no longer feel safe in their homes. From reaction times, to availability of resources such as vehicles, to professional courtesy at the incident site, to investigation, prosecution and conviction, police and their counterparts in the judiciary are failing Gaborone and its residents. The city continues at the mercy of thugs fortified by these systemic loopholes, and rather than tackle the problem, police are content to stick their heads in the sand like ostriches, rather than swoop down on crime like eagles.

Today’s thought“It’s about time law enforcement got as organised as organised crime.”– Rudy Giuliani