Reports of petty criminals freely walking the streets of Laudium and pouncing on houses that are easy targets, continue, with police seemingly uninterested in carrying out ‘stop and search’ operations on a frequent basis, in order to prevent these crimes from continuing.
Residents’ pleads for more police patrols continue to be met with deaf ears, with police clearly not interested in stopping the petty crimes committed, mostly by nyaopes. The concern of residents is that the very same nyaopes could start committing more serious crimes, such as murder or robbery, if they can so easily get away with the petty crimes. It remains common for residents to wake up in the morning, only to find that their garden tap or light fitting or even their plants from the garden have been stolen during the night. The local police have clearly not taken the community into their confidence, as partners in fighting crime as, to this date, neither the community nor even the elected CPF, have information as to how many vehicles are patrolling at any given time and how many are in for repairs. The CPF has not even been told, what ‘manpower’ shortages there are at the station.
Resident, Jameel Ebrahim, told the Laudium Sun, “With police turning a blind eye on these nyaopes who are responsible for most of the petty crimes, a dangerous precedent is being set, as these very petty criminals will soon start committing more serious crimes, where our people could get hurt or even killed. Remember the story of the ‘broken window syndrome’ in New York, by the then Mayor, who said if you allow one window to be left broken, before you know it there will be many windows broken. If we do not give full attention to the small incidents of crimes that are taking place in Laudium, we will soon have a storm of crimes, that will be uncontrollable.”
This follows another report of petty crime this week, whereby an outside solar light was stolen from a yard on 13th Ave. Resident Zainab Bhayla told the Laudium Sun, “Because of the continuous loadshedding, we decided to install the more expensive solar lights in our yard, for security reasons. It becomes very scary when the whole yard is in darkness and with all the crime going on, we though the least we should do, is to have solar lights in our yard. There was loadshedding last Thursday during the night, but we were surprised to note that our yard was in darkness, despite installing a solar flood light. So, my husband and I thought maybe the light was faulty or it did not get enough time to recharge due to the ongoing loadshedding. The next morning when my husband was about to leave for work, he thought he would quickly check the outside spotlight, to see why it was not working the previous night. He was shocked to find that the entire light fitting had been stolen and called me to have a look. We have security fencing and the light was mounted quite high, so we just could not figure out how the thief or thieves managed to enter our yard and remove the fitting. We suspect that it these nyaope guys who were intoxicated, because our neighbor pointed to us beer cans in front of their yard. It seems that the thieves were sitting and drinking before jumping into our yard.”
The neighbor on 13th Ave, Yasmin Adam, told the Laudium Sun, “Crime on our street is out of hand. We had a break-in last week, whereby thieves jumped onto our balcony and went into one of our bedrooms, by breaking open the lock of the sliding door. They stole curtains, bedding and other valuable things. Although I phoned our security company and the police, to this day I have not received any feedback from them.”
