Cape Town: Illegal foreign nationals in SA were criminals’ targets of choice, with robberies prevalent in foreign-owned small businesses, Parliament’s police committee heard yesterday. Western Cape provincial commissioner Arno Lamoer said almost 70% of business robberies in the province were of foreign nationals who were running spaza shops and tuck shops.
"It is a very serious problem," he said.
Provincial police commissioners yesterday told the committee that as victims were in the country illegally when they were robbed, they had no recourse to the law. MPs described the situation as "bordering on xenophobia".
Commissioner Lamoer explained that as these businesses did not enjoy banking services, criminals could be sure that, at any given time, there would be cash on the premises.
In most cases the business owners slept at their business premises, allowing criminals to break in and force them to hand over the money, he said.
Mr Lamoer said there were 8000 foreign nationals arriving in the Western Cape every month. As many of them were trading without the required permits, they were vulnerable to being robbed as they were reluctant to report the crimes to the police.
Other provincial police commissioners concurred that foreigners were also being targeted in their policing areas.
Democratic Alliance MP Dianne Kohler Barnard expressed concern that the situation bordered on xenophobic attacks. She also took the commissioners to task for sprucing up police stations only when they knew that an oversight visit from the committee was imminent — "sugar coating does not help anyone".
Inkatha Freedom Party MP Velaphi Ndlovu also expressed concern about the targeting of foreigners, saying that people did not understand xenophobia.
On a different tack, Freedom Front Plus MP Pieter Groenewald took the provincial commissioners to task over the crime statistics they were claiming for their provinces.
"Crime statistics of the police are under suspicion because provincial commissioners’ statistics differ from the crime statistics in the annual reports of the police (nationally)," he said. "It is little wonder that the public does not trust the annual crime statistics and believes that they are manipulated."
These differences were discovered when provincial commissioners yesterday reported on the functioning of the police in every province. According to the North West commissioner, the murder statistics were unchanged for the 2010-11 year from the 2009-10 year. Yet the national annual report suggested murder in the province had increased 7,9%, while in the case of assault with the intent to do grievous bodily harm, the commissioner said that it had declined by 3% whereas the annual report suggested an increase of 4,3%.
Similar discrepancies existed in the Western Cape, Northern Cape and other provinces. "All the commissioners use these statistics to measure their performance in their respective provinces but the figures do not add up."
Mr Groenewald said either the commissioners were hiding the crime statistics to look good, or the minister of police and the national commissioner were misleading the public.
