The City of Cape Town has asked the national government to ‘refine’ South Africa’s lockdown regulations to make implementation easier for the police and military.<\/p>\n
Currently, any person found on the street may plausibly claim to be out for the purposes of shopping for food, said the city’s mayoral committee member for safety and security JP Smith.<\/p>\n
This means it is impossible for the police, whether SAPS, SANDF, Metro Police or Law Enforcement, to truthfully determine whether a person is entitled to be on the street or not, he said.<\/p>\n
“The City is therefore calling for the national government to amend the regulations to limit the hours of shopping at shopping malls as well as spaza and tuck shops to the hours of 09hoo to 13h00 daily as everybody will have had the chance to undertake their necessary shopping once the grant recipients have drawn their grant payments.<\/p>\n
“We also call on them to limit the number of people who may be out to shop on any day to specific surnames who may be out on any given day or some other provision in the regulations to make regulations more helpful for the police to be able to improve the situation on the streets.”<\/p>\n
Smith said that the national government should also reconsider its stance on the deployment of the neighbourhood watches.<\/p>\n
“There are thousands of well-trained neighbourhood watches in Cape Town who would be able to continue doing the good work they do every day in fighting crime, as we have already seen criminals changing their modus operandi to take advantage of the lockdown,” he said.<\/p>\n
New regulations\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n While the government has already made a number of changes to South Africa’s lockdown regulations, it has not indicated whether it plans to further restrict South Africans during the 21-day period.<\/p>\n