READER LETTER | Citizens live in fear as crime intensifies

Violent crime has reached critical levels. Every city has become a target area, law-abiding citizens have to endure pain, degradation and humiliation as they are bludgeoned into submission as their homes are ransacked with brazen audacity by vicious thugs.

Citizens of our rainbow nation are living under siege as crime intensifies on a daily basis. The woes and fears of citizens seem not to be going away anytime soon as criminal elements are holding us to ransom.

Fear and trepidation are our constant companions as we struggle to contain violent crime that confronts us all with its deadly consequences. Violence and crime in our neighbourhood engulfs us all on a daily basis from womb to tomb.

These lawbreakers have brazenly displayed contempt for human life and the law. Today, we are not only aware of our own brutal violence, we are frightened by it. We are pessimistic that our rainbow nation cannot extricate itself from its state of anarchy and arrest its crisis of crime.

Many of us of different political persuasions feel alienated from controlling our own lives. Our society is angry and awash with killers who stalk us night and day. We believe that those who show utter contempt for human life by committing remorseless premeditated murder justly forfeit the right to their own lives.

Farouk Araie, Benoni