By Nangamso Mabindla
27 August 2004

LOCAL government authorities need to play a bigger role in the eradication of crime in our cities, said Jacobus Smit, president of the Institute for Municipal Law Enforcement of Southern Africa (IMLE) at a two-day conference at the East London City Hall on Thursday, August 26.

The conference is aimed at assisting local authorities, whose job it is to enforce by-laws, to find ways to implement law enforcement in cities.

"By-laws are not enforced as efficiently as they supposed to; these are the basics of law enforcement," said Smit.

If basic laws were enforced successfully, crime would be easily dealt with before it increases to bigger crimes, Smit said.

"If you are successful in squashing the smaller crimes; these criminals will not grow and commit gross crimes like murder," he said.

But for the fight against crime to be a success, local authorities and the South African Police Services needed to work in unison. "The one cannot be successful with out the other. If local authorities tackle small crimes, then SAPS can tackle the bigger crimes."

Municipalities were all about service delivery and other departments also needed to join the fight. "Some departments think that crime is not their problem; we need to rope in all the departments," said Smit.

In some areas crime was facilitated by lack of resources like electricity. "If it's dark it's easy to commit crime; for us to work efficiently we would ask the electricity department to instal street light in that area. If that is done, it then makes it easier for local authorities to prevent these crimes," Smit added.

The Eastern Cape National Councillor of IMLE, Fikile Hintsa, said the conference would also help smaller municipalities feel part of the Institute.

"We've been taking this conference around the country; we've now brought it here so that we could have representatives from smaller municipalities like Umthatha, Butterworth, and Buffalo City."

Smit said the ILME wanted to help these disadvantaged municipalities in the fight against crime in their areas.