The Douglasdale South African Police Service together with the Douglasdale Community Policing Forum (CPF) will be hosting an “Open Day” on Saturday the 9th April starting at 9am and running through to noon. Designed to build an information and relationship bridge between the members of the Douglasdale community and its Police Service, the object of the day is that all detectives and station management will be at the station together with current dockets and all members of the public who have cases reported at Douglasdale are invited to come to the station and enquire as to the status of their cases and obtain feedback and progress updates.
The detectives’ services will also use the opportunity to obtain any outstanding information and feedback from complainants as well with the additional objective being to prepare any outstanding dockets for Court. The CPF will have all its sector leaders there for the public to see where they can get involved to assist and the CPF crime intelligence, victims support, social upliftment, domestic watch and training as well as main committee members will be present to assist.
Douglasdale CPF Chair Advocate Jean Berdou says that one of the identified areas of concern with the Police Services and the public is the lack of feedback and progress updates on matters reported to the Police. This exercise, which, if successful, shall be held every quarter, is a joint SAPS CPF initiative the object of which is to meet the investigation feedback need on the part of the community and to provide an additional information gathering platform for the SAPS. The war against crime is being fought on a number of fronts such as crime prevention, crime detection and prosecutions for criminal offences committed. Perpetrators know that there is an effective criminal justice system operating in our precinct. They also know if they come to our precinct it is well policed and backed by an aware and vigilant public and if you do crime, you will almost certainly be caught and prosecuted.
Information flow and crime intelligence is vital to the success of combating crime. I urge all community members that have reported crimes to the SAPS Douglasdale to come to the station on Saturday the 9th April between 9am and noon and meet all the SAPS leadership and CPF representatives and let’s look into your case and provide feedback. Your diligence can lead to criminals being put behind bars where they belong.