The business of Cleveland business: fighting crime

By Barbara Ludman

THE Cleveland Community Policing Forum (CPF) is strong on business. "If you don't have business behind you, you're not going to achieve anything," says CPF chair Robbie Taitz.

The local business forums come to CPF meetings, and local businesses have made a range of donations - from a digital camera to be used at crime scenes to financing for the monthly Top Cop award. Local business has also built a ramp, giving the wheelchair-bound access to the police station. "The station is 100 years old this year - it will become a heritage site next year," says Taitz. "And up until this year it didn't even have a ramp to get to the client service centre."

Business links are being forged - but business methods are also important. And when Taitz - in his ordinary life, the sales director of an international firm - assumed the chair of the organisation, he and his management team took a mere eight months to turn around an unfocussed, fairly moribund CPF.

Here are a few of the CPF's recent initiatives:

They've raised money from local business to establish an office at the police station, staffed by a local, unemployed woman whose expenses they pay, and sent her off for a computer literacy course.
Local business has also paid for information packs for every one of the 131 policemen attached to the station; the packs were drawn up by the station commissioner and the CPF;
They have got a domestic watch programme up and running in Malvern, one of the areas covered by the Cleveland CPF.
A monthly Top Cop award has just been set up, financed by local business to reward those police officers who "go the extra mile".
The Cleveland CPF was established in the mid-1990s but had fallen on difficult times when local councillor Carol Milner approached Taitz, who had been active in the Bruma Business Forum and the local residents' association.

His predecessors, he said, had "lost heart in terms of what they were doing". The CPF "ended up being a residents' association-driven instead of a business association-driven forum. We used to get residents as opposed to business interests coming to meetings. The funding we need to keep this organisation going and drive performance is largely depending on finance" - and that comes from business, not from residents

There is plenty of business in the area - and other elements as well. "We're probably one of the few stations that has a railway line, a hostel, squatter camps, heavy industrial commercial-cum-residential, shopping centres and business malls." It also has a spread of housing, from R1,5-million homes in Bruma to RDP housing.

"We've got the poorest of the poor of the community and the richest of the rich," says station commissioner Senior Superintendent Eddie Mboweni. "That has a lot of impact on our policing." The five sectors - each with its own sector manager - tell the story: Cyrildene/Bruma/De Wetshof, Kensington, Malvern, Denver and Herriotdale/City Deep.

Most of the crime involves property - motor vehicle theft, burglary in business or residential properties. But in Malvern lately there have been incidents of rape, including child rape, and assault.

On the bright side, however, "the problem of hijackings is now very much under control".

Mboweni is happy with the current CPF. "It's working very well indeed," he says. "Now we have things really happening."

There seems to be a momentum. Taitz says he gets about 50 people to the CPF's monthly meetings. They include three of the four councillors, the Malvern and Kensington residents' associations, business forums, the Metro Police. The Victim Support Programme is operating "hand-in-hand" with the CPF. Two members of the forum are going out to the schools to talk to learners about, among other things, not tying up 10111 with fake calls.

The new revitalised CPF has not yet run out of projects. A CPF will inevitably step on the toes of the people who patrol for a living, like the private security companies in Bruma and Kensington, for example, where "there is still plenty of work to be done".

As for the function of monitoring police: "It's not a problem," says Taitz. "You've got to be very cognisant of not irritating the guys you're going to be working with by getting on their backs all the time." He is well aware, he says, that it is not the task of the CPF to manage the station. That's the function of the station's management.

For more information, contact CPF representative Prudence Khumalo at (011) 677-5750 from 9am to 2pm or CPF secretary Mike van Koningsbruggen at (011) 615-8950. Contact Station Commissioner Senior Superintendent Eddie Mboweni at (011) 677-5700 and VSP director Karen Stilwell at 083-309-6840.