Khayelitsha, one of Cape Town’s largest suburbs, has been rocked by several mass shootings in the past few months. On Youth Day (with ANC councillors for the area glaringly absent) members of the community raised the situation with a delegation that included Police Minister Bheki Cele.
In the space of a year, 86 people have died in mass shootings in Khayelitsha, said Major-General Vincent Beaton, the cluster commander for the area.
On Thursday, Beaton spoke at the Khayelitsha Crisis Response Summit at the Khayelitsha Campus of False Bay College, where he broke down some crime statistics from the three local police stations.
The stations — Khayelitsha, Harare and Lingelethu-West — cover about 392,000 people across 12 wards, according to 2011 census data, although the area has since expanded from newer informal settlements.
Beaton told the crowd — including Police Minister Bheki Cele, Western Cape MEC for Police Oversight and Community Safety Reagan Allen, community policing structures and religious representatives — that between the three police stations, from April 2021 to March 2022, 36 dockets had been opened specifically related to mass shootings that claimed the lives of 86 people.
The area has made headlines for these mass murders.
In the…