"BUILD the community, isolate the criminals," proclaims the motto of the Yeoville Community Policing Forum.
Established in 2000, this is the second forum to be set up in the area. The first one collapsed in 1999 due to internal strife. The Yeoville forum, which also covers Observatory, Bellevue and upper Houghton, faces a number of challenges - but has devised a variety of initiatives to deal with them.
Campaigns to bring residents together now feature prominently on the forum programme. On Heritage Day for instance, the forum took to the streets with music, plays and even tree planting events at the local recreation centre to reinforce the sense of community. A quarterly newsletter distributed to all Yeoville residents has been developed. It will in future be posted on the Yeoville website.
Plans to set up street committees in all parts of the suburb are at an advanced stage. Among their duties will be to bring residents together. But, according to Karl von Holdt, a longtime member of the forum, the street committees will also be "policing the police".
The forum hopes to help improve the effectiveness and skills of the police by monitoring their performance and making them accountable to the community.
These goals - building community and monitoring police - converge in a third goal: to link residents to the police. Residents will be expected to look out for problems and to liaise with police. By building community structures, the forum hopes to ensure that the community relays information to the police.
To ensure that police execute their duties effectively, the forum wants to see the Yeoville police station upgraded and eventually a new one built to support the existing one. Currently, the station is bursting at the seams; the CID branch has had to be housed in separate premises in Houghton.
The Johannesburg branch of Rotary International is the forum's "business partner" and has helped with equipment for use by the police.
Station commander Superintendent Freddy Bothma identifies street robberies and housebreakings as the area's biggest crime problems.
Von Holdt estimates that it will take about three to five years to completely bring down crime as "there are no easy and quick solutions".
The Yeoville forum's Victim Empowerment Project helps victims of violent crime with counselling in a comfort room, helping them through the difficult process of making statements and filling in forms and ongoing monitoring of court cases.
The forum is also trying "to put pressure on the Metro Council to implement by-laws and service delivery effectively", and it is "moderately hopeful" that the situation is improving. The forum has spearheaded a crackdown on illegal businesses - largely shebeens, panel beaters, taxi ranks and phone booths on suburban streets and illegal clubs on Rockey and Raleigh Streets.
By working on its "four legs" campaign - team building, the victim empowerment project, supporting the police and community activity - the forum is not looking back but focussing on eradicating all criminal activities.
