JOHANNESBURG'S playground, Honeydew, is one of the most dangerous policing clusters in the city. This is according to statistics presented by the police to the portfolio committee on community safety.
The report, which covers the financial year ending March 31 2014, shows that of 26 categories of crimes recorded by police, the Honeydew cluster was in the top four in 17 of the crimes.
This cluster includes Diepsloot, Douglasdale, Florida, Honeydew, Randburg and Roodepoort. It also covers Cosmo City and the informal settlements of Zandspruit, Itsoseng, Kya Sands, Pipeline, Durban Deep and Matholesville.
The population of this cluster is 1.17million. In that area, 245 people were murdered, which was an increase of 9.4%. The cluster had the highest number of house robberies, with 980, an increase of 15%.
Honeydew police station topped the province with 391 cases.
Robberies at nonresidential premises went up by 28%, attempted murders by 14%. Honeydew's cluster commander Lieutenant-General Oswald Reddy, who has 32 years of policing experience, admitted that policing the area was a huge challenge, in particular because of a lack of crime intelligence.
He said, however, that tactics such as identifying hotspots and deploying officers was working but that it didn't deal with the root causes of the crime.
With good crime intelligence, Reddy said, syndicates can be identified, profiled and the whole supply chain of the crime was detected, enabling police to arrest the crimi-nals before they commit the crime.
Reddy said the high murder rate in his cluster had to do with illegal mining in the area. The biggest contributor to the murders was the Roodepoort area.
Alcohol and drugs were also a contributor to violent crimes. ". with the new development, people do not know each other, so the criminals take advantage of that."
Criminologist Professor Anthony Minnaar said the Honeydew cluster's crime problem had to do with myriad factors, from its close proximity to Diepsloot, police training and a lack of resources.
Chairwoman of the community policing forum in Randburg, Sandy Andrew, complained about the lack of cooperation from residents in the area when they were warned.
"People think 'it is never going to happen to me'," she said.
For more stories like this one, be sure to buy the Sowetan newspaper from Mondays to Fridays
Honeydew the 'most dangerous' place in Joburg
JOHANNESBURG'S playground, Honeydew, is one of the most dangerous policing clusters in the city. This is according to statistics presented by the police to the portfolio committee on community safety.
The report, which covers the financial year ending March 31 2014, shows that of 26 categories of crimes recorded by police, the Honeydew cluster was in the top four in 17 of the crimes.
This cluster includes Diepsloot, Douglasdale, Florida, Honeydew, Randburg and Roodepoort. It also covers Cosmo City and the informal settlements of Zandspruit, Itsoseng, Kya Sands, Pipeline, Durban Deep and Matholesville.
The population of this cluster is 1.17million. In that area, 245 people were murdered, which was an increase of 9.4%. The cluster had the highest number of house robberies, with 980, an increase of 15%.
Honeydew police station topped the province with 391 cases.
Robberies at nonresidential premises went up by 28%, attempted murders by 14%. Honeydew's cluster commander Lieutenant-General Oswald Reddy, who has 32 years of policing experience, admitted that policing the area was a huge challenge, in particular because of a lack of crime intelligence.
He said, however, that tactics such as identifying hotspots and deploying officers was working but that it didn't deal with the root causes of the crime.
With good crime intelligence, Reddy said, syndicates can be identified, profiled and the whole supply chain of the crime was detected, enabling police to arrest the crimi-nals before they commit the crime.
Reddy said the high murder rate in his cluster had to do with illegal mining in the area. The biggest contributor to the murders was the Roodepoort area.
Alcohol and drugs were also a contributor to violent crimes. ". with the new development, people do not know each other, so the criminals take advantage of that."
Criminologist Professor Anthony Minnaar said the Honeydew cluster's crime problem had to do with myriad factors, from its close proximity to Diepsloot, police training and a lack of resources.
Chairwoman of the community policing forum in Randburg, Sandy Andrew, complained about the lack of cooperation from residents in the area when they were warned.
"People think 'it is never going to happen to me'," she said.
For more stories like this one, be sure to buy the Sowetan newspaper from Mondays to Fridays
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