First Safety Cabinet meeting held to track delivery of the Western Cape Safety Plan
Western Cape Premier Alan Winde chaired the first Western Cape Safety Cabinet meeting today.
The Safety Cabinet, which will take place every six weeks, brings together representatives from across the safety cluster, in order to track and measure progress on the Western Cape Safety Plan.
The meeting was attended by the entire Western Cape Cabinet and representatives from across the entire criminal justice system, among them, Western Cape Provincial Police Commissioner Yolisa Matakata, and representatives from the City of Cape Town, and the Departments of Justice and Constitutional Development, and Correctional Services.
The first meeting was an opportunity to present and confirm the metrics that will be used for the Safety Dashboard. This dashboard will be the mechanism used to both track the progress towards the goals set out in the Western Cape Safety Plan and for the executive to make itself accountable to the people of the Western Cape.
Each department in the Western Cape Government has been assigned a safety priority in the plan, in order to reduce violence and address the issues that contribute towards violent behavior. The dashboard will track progress in each of these areas.
Premier Winde said: “The aim of the Safety Plan is to make the people of the Western Cape feel safer in their communities, with a specific target of halving the murder rate over the next ten years. In order to achieve this, we must be able to measure and track progress and report back on progress being made. Today’s first Safety Cabinet was a positive first step towards efficiency and accountability to the people of this province. We can only achieve this if we are working across all three spheres of government, and I thank all the parties involved, who participated today.”
“We will now take the feedback we received today, consider and implement it over the next six weeks before we meet again,” Premier Winde said.
Minister for Community Safety, Albert Fritz said: “The Western Cape Government is putting its citizens first by prioritising safety in a way that no other provincial government has. To that end, we have established the Safety Cabinet with the sole purpose of ensuring that the Western Cape Safety Plan is successfully implemented. Over the next ten years, the Safety Plan aims to halve the murder rate through its interrelated programmes of increasing law enforcement and implementing programmes which reduce violence, and ultimately tackle the root causes of crime.”
Media enquiries:
Bianca Capazorio
Tel: 021 483 5004
Cell: 072 372 7044
E-mail: bianca.capazorio@westerncape.gov.za
