Durban — Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) in KwaZulu-Natal will stage a picket outside police provincial headquarters in Durban on Friday morning to highlight the police's failure to prevent mass killings that have taken place in the province.
In a statement issued by Cosatu provincial secretary Edwin Mkhize on Thursday, he said his union was concerned that police were reacting to the crime rather than preventing it.
Mkhize said some of the concerns they want to raise with police management in the province are the lack of visible policing in all communities and control of firearms in society.
“We demand that our law enforcement must be accountable. There must be accountability for every reported criminal case. We demand that the law enforcement strategy must be crime prevention rather than reactionary,” read the statement.
Mkhize told the Daily News on Thursday that the union felt that if something was not done the country would degenerate into lawlessness because of the police’s failures to prevent crime.
He said years back there was a police unit called “Khiph' sibhamu” which was dedicated to collecting illegal firearms in society. He said for the police to be able to successfully prevent crime the unit must be resuscitated.
Mkhize added that the union had noted the quick breakthroughs by police in arresting suspects of mass killings in the province but that these would have been prevented had the police dedicated themselves to ridding illegal firearms from society.
He said arresting suspects did not bring back the people that they had killed.
The province has seen mass killings in the taverns in the recent past with two major ones taking place in Pietermaritzburg and Savannah Park in Pinetown.
Daily News