The South African Institute for Security Studies says incidents of robbery have increased in the Eastern Cape, particularly hijackings as well as business and house robberies.
Speaking at a breakfast on Thursday hosted by Eastern Cape Business Against Crime, The Institute's Justice and Crime Division Head, Gareth Newham, says, overall, robberies have gone up by 12%.
Newham says there are not enough policing resources to deal with this increase so residents of the Eastern Cape will likely see police less often in comparison to police visibility in other provinces.
He says in order to improve safety for everybody we need to start re-orientating how we understand crime.
"It's not a problem police can solve, we have enough police officials but we need a new approach. Police have been losing people because the budget can't sustain the numbers. Two years ago we had 199 000 people in SAPS we now down to about 194 000 but the plan is to go down to 188 000. We have enough police officials."
Newham says the country is reaping the consequences of bad policies that have been in place at a national level within SAPS.
"You can't fight crime like robbery at any level unless you have specialised detectives, crime intelligence capacity directed at who's committing them, how they selling the goods and how they operate. You simply can't do it, you fighting crime in the dark and thats why we need to see big changes in SAPS to get those things corrected. It must be communicated clearly to the public and parliament. You can't have national leadership of the police that keeps on telling us we working on it but don't give us details. We all need to be in this together and the more information they share with communities the more we can work together in solving these problems." says Newham
