Listen here.JP Smith has spent years being told his city is one of the world's most violent. He didn't dispute it. He explained why. Nearly every gun his officers pulled off the street came back to bite them: nineteen times out of twenty, the man caught red-handed walked free, because Cape Town cannot investigate its own arrests. That fight over investigative powers, now heading to court against national government, ran alongside almost everything else that landed on his desk this fortnight: a pet bylaw row that briefly convinced half the city it was about to be taxed for owning a cat, a cabinet minister repeating a gangster's phone call on camera, a R3 billion construction site with a 28s gang boss's family on the books, and a straight answer to the question everyone keeps asking him: would he help Helen Zille fix Johannesburg. Alec Hogg sat down with the MMC for safety and security to get all of it on the record..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..Edited transcript of the interview.Alec Hogg: JP Smith is the MMC for safety and security in the City of Cape Town. Now, this is a tougher job than you might imagine, because just about every listicle that you look at about dangerous cities in the world seems to have Cape Town up there somewhere. So JP, that kind of, from the outside, from a neutral observer, from a cold look at it: if Cape Town is such a dangerous city, then the guy supposed to be looking after the safety and security can't be doing a great job. But I know there's a lot more to it. But where do you come from when you see these lists from around the world that say Cape Town is such a bad place?JP Smith: Deeply disappointing and intensely self-indicting. I have a very strong sense of responsibility. I get it from an Afrikaans Protestant mother who trades in guilt. She's a super nice lady, I realise, I realise, but her first weapon was always to make you feel that you had disappointed her, and that is a strongly developed psychological force in me.Alec Hogg: Catholics are just as bad.JP Smith: I try my level best at all times. And when I see Cape Town accused of high crime, which I experience daily in my working environment with people, it bites deeply. We have done, I can tell you, there is not a lever left to pull that we can access to fix that. In our defence, we used to hover around the number seven to nine mark on those lists of most violent cities. Every year a Mexican NGO would bring out a research list of that, and we would sit there around the middle or top ten mark. We are now between number 17 and 19 on the list, hopefully soon to fall off it altogether.Alec Hogg: How do you rate in South Africa? Hang on, hang on, where do you rate in South Africa? Okay, so were you the worst? Okay, who's taken over?JP Smith: How are we falling off the list? I think we're the fourth most violent... we were at one point or the other.Alec Hogg: But I think there's a bigger story here, and we have discussed this before. And maybe let's just go along to that point. You've got certain levers you can pull, but you certainly don't have all of them. And I know there's been an attempt to get more devolution of policing powers. Have you had any success in that?JP Smith: So just on the previous point, if I felt that I had failed, if I felt that I had not done everything humanly possible, then I would by now have stepped down. I have said often to our senior staff, I've challenged my colleagues and said, if these stats do not improve, if we can't impact on that, then we must step down, we must give somebody else a chance to do it. But as Shamila Batohi says, the failure of policing in South Africa is the failure to achieve convictions. And of that I have become fairly convinced. So yes, we are absolutely pursuing more powers, specifically the investigative powers, with some basic forensic powers and crime intelligence powers. But those are secondary. The prime thing is investigations, because it's used-crime that contributes around 21 to 24% of our murder rate every single year: gun violence, and specifically gang violence. We have this ingrained, embedded gang culture. It's been coming for many, many decades, long before I was anywhere near the city.And it is a horrible thing where a small group of gangsters hold entire communities' public image and daily normalcy at hostage. Some years ago, we decided that a key thing to do was to tackle the firearms, the illegal firearms, because that was the tool of the trade in order to perpetrate this violence. And we went from doing 30 to 70 guns a year, which we thought was great, to now doing 450 to 500 illegal guns that we take off the street a year. But in that statistic, sadly, around 4.7% of those people we arrest caught red-handed with an illegal gun, often on body cam, multiple witnesses, only 4.7% of them were convicted. The other 95 out of every 100 walk free.So when you keep on doing this, taking more and more guns off the street, aside from the fact that there seems to be an endless supply of guns and a complete failure of crime intelligence to identify the source of that, which allegedly only national government can do or wants to do. They don't want to let us do that, which is part of why Geordin is going to court now.JP Smith: The broken part is not me running up and down the streets, putting more and more boots on the ground: 1,300 extra staff in these last four years, 2,800 extra staff in the last six years we've put on the street. It's not the boots on the ground, it's not the thin blue line. It is the collapse of your criminal justice system, the frailty of your investigative power in SAPS. Detectives are overloaded with cases, sitting with 200, 300 dockets which they're never going to get to. A detective can viably investigate 25 dockets. More than that is not going to happen. And sitting with conviction rates in single digits for most serious violent crimes, including your sexual and GBV-related crimes, which is a crying shame for our entire country.Alec Hogg: Do you read history? There's a wonderful book called Factfulness. And the essence of Factfulness is that societies develop at different rates. And when I look at Cape Town and I look back into history, it sounds like Cape Town is like Al Capone-era Chicago. Of course, today Chicago is a very different city. But back then in the 1920s, the gangs ran the place. They seemed to be able to bribe most of the cops until there was a real showdown, and eventually Capone went to jail and the gangs were broken. Is there anything in your armoury that will enable you to address this? Because from what I hear of people in Cape Town, the opportunity or the career choice, if you happen to be coming from the township areas, would be to become a gangster and do well, or to become not a gangster and perhaps battle.JP Smith: I don't know, you'll have to ask the thousand young people in Project 1000 who all came in and became Metro cops. That was the intake of young Metro Police law enforcement and traffic officers we took in two and a half years ago, who are now our neighbourhood safety officers, five Metro Police officers in every ward of the city, except where we have LEAP, where there's about 250 officers in the police precinct from our law enforcement advancement programme. And those two interventions together have, four quarters in a row now, brought our current crime rate down.Four consecutive quarters we've seen a dip in every serious violent crime statistic, starting with murder, attempted murder, and then almost every category, except usually for one, and that has varied. So, four quarters of sustained crime reduction in Cape Town. Watch this space. We are going to dip out of that top 20. We are starting to turn the bend on the road. But I am deeply frustrated where, if you ask what levers we have available, investigations is where we're going. You will remember the former minister, Bheki Cele. He used to call my investigative unit the rogue unit. He used to threaten prosecuting me and the unit, made all kinds of disparaging remarks, but that unit has done remarkable work.Alec Hogg: Why were you a "rogue" unit?JP Smith: Because he does not believe that the city should have investigative powers. And we got to the point where we realised we could not proceed without investigative powers. It is absolutely pointless to keep on catching more gangsters, more extortionists, for whom you then have to hand over to the South African Police Service. As soon as we make the arrest, we hand them over to SAPS. We do the A1 statement, it goes into the docket, and from there it's in the domain of the investigating officer.So we started by just doing watching briefs, something the province introduced some years ago, where we just have staff who track these cases through the criminal justice system. It's quite hard, SAPS refused to give us access to the systems, so you have to do it manually, station to station. So we track those results. And when we started to do that, we could see the completely collapsed conviction rates. And if you're not getting convictions, then putting another 500 to 1,000 officers on the street will have an impact, but a very small one. Every time, a small little incremental impact.What I am absolutely convinced will have a material, substantial, meaningful, game-changing impact, is getting the investigations right. It's getting those people we're arresting with the guns convicted and put away so they cannot keep on shooting, and the shooting stops. You present an effective, conviction-ready case to the prosecuting authority, the public prosecutor, so that they are confident to proceed with investigation. What happens at the moment is we hand the case over to an overloaded detective. That detective will investigate as far as he can, but he's juggling all these other cases. He's got the media on his case, he's got the station commander on his case, he's got community members screaming at him about their individual cases. And then he sends the firearm away to ballistics, because ballistics have to say this is a firearm, that this thing propels a projectile out of the muzzle at a certain velocity and therefore qualifies as a firearm. And that test alone is backlogged for many months: six, nine, twelve, or longer. And so by the time that case comes back, by and large the case has now been postponed several times and the NPA has withdrawn it. The prosecutor has withdrawn that case from the court and the court case goes cold. That shooter walks away, or at least there's a high probability of it. For me, the single most important lever now is investigative power.And Geordin has come to this conclusion in a mere four years. I've been shouting this for ten years. I tried to get Patricia de Lille already to do this when she was mayor. But Geordin came to the conclusion very rapidly by watching what was going on. We've been engaging sincerely for a decade with SAPS about these expanded powers. We're saying to them, we're happy to stay in our lane, our lane is traffic and law enforcement, we're happy to do our job. But then you must do yours. If you cannot do yours and your communities are held at ransom, we have high crime rates, we have communities in turmoil, people needlessly being killed. You can't stop gangsters from killing each other if they're absolutely committed to it. But you can take away the tools of their trade and try to protect the innocent members of those communities, and that must happen.And so now we have declared a dispute. We started the dispute process. Cachalia did not respond by the deadline. We sent another letter, the mayor sent another letter to say we're giving you a small extension. That hasn't happened. Now we're in informal dispute territory. That actually doesn't take as long as you think, and then we'll go to court. And hopefully a court, with all the abundant evidence available, and it truly is abundant, sitting in the public domain, will say that national government's refusal to expand the powers of local government, not just Cape Town but all local authorities, is irrational, not in the public interest. Because that's the test: is the decision-maker's decision irrational? We believe it would be, because again, we'll do our own job if you can do yours, but if you can't do yours, you have to get out of our way and allow us to help. Blocking us from doing so, when you are allowing the criminal justice system to die on its feet, is not an option.Alec Hogg: That's very good news. And it's almost like there's a wave going through society. I don't know if you picked up yesterday, Sakeliga won the case against government, which was trying to force estate agents to have BEE in their companies. Remember, many estate agents are very small, and otherwise they wouldn't get a fidelity certificate, which meant they couldn't sell property. That has been thrown out and is no longer allowed. It was a bad law, and the court has said it's a bad law, so it took it to court and won the case.JP Smith: We have an immediate piece of legislation called AARTO, the Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences Act, which is a deeply broken piece of legislation. And those municipalities who have been stuck with it, who did not resist it enthusiastically enough, are now really suffering. I went to the Institute for Traffic Licensing and Municipal Police Officers two weeks ago for their annual conference, and the municipalities there had no good news about AARTO. It is in fact doing the opposite of what national government intended for it to do.Alec Hogg: I don't know anything about this. Just unpack it from the beginning.JP Smith: AARTO is the points-demerit system. It's the piece of legislation that says that when you commit an offence, you don't just get a fine that you can pay and walk away from, especially if you're rich, you don't care about that fine, you pay it and carry on offending. AARTO gives you a certain number of points, and over time you lose points until your licence is suspended. The intention is noble and appropriate, and it didn't exist in many other countries. The devil is, as always, in the detail. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, no more so than here.And in the places where AARTO has been implemented, the death toll on their roads has gone up. In Cape Town, which has aggressively resisted AARTO along with the rest of the Western Cape, we have managed to stabilise our road death toll, because it effectively reduces enforcement, because it creates a significant cost. In the AARTO legislation, you are obliged to serve a registered letter through the South African Post Office on the offender. That is a costly endeavour, around 60 rand.Alec Hogg: What's going on?JP Smith: And that means your enforcement starts costing you money. Every time you undertake an enforcement action, you're losing money, because the percentage of people who pay is so low, especially in the north, and we have about a three times higher payment rate here than in Gauteng, due to consistency of enforcement. And the fact that we go after the scofflaws. We're not cash-cowing, giving fines to soft targets to get them to pay so we can make money. We go after the scofflaws. Those who get a fine and don't pay it, it becomes a warrant, and we've got several mechanisms for doing so. So because we've consistently done the enforcement better, the road death toll in places with AARTO has actually worsened, and that is because your enforcement is now discouraged from bringing on additional staff for its enforcement action. So when AARTO was originally announced, we resisted it strongly.Alec Hogg: Where do the courts come in here?JP Smith: We indicated to the minister that we would go to court, that we would get an interdict to stop it. We started proceedings as such, and the process was then halted. When the minister tried to initiate it again, we engaged in further action. We ceased our own action at one point because OUTA went to court. And unfortunately the OUTA case was not successful, which is a big blow to the argument around this.But in my mind, fundamental to the whole problem, and we are again now in a dispute, by the way, on this as well, on AARTO. The intergovernmental dispute process was underway two weeks ago, I don't know where it is at the moment. But fundamental to this is constitutional overreach. It is this incessant centralisation, the psychosis of national government wanting to overreach. The answer to everything is centralise, centralise. My answer to most things is: get it the heck away from national government and let us do it at local government, where we are accountable.Alec Hogg: No, and the overreach is a theme that we've been looking at on BizNews, so many of these things are happening. Let's go back to the hottest story in Cape Town at the moment, and that's to do with pet licences. I spoke to Geordin earlier this week, and he said it's a storm in a teacup. We then had many people writing and saying, but in the bylaws, it says that... What is the reality here? I haven't been able to find your bylaws, but what do your bylaws say about pets?JP Smith: It's readily available. You can Google it if you like data collection, or you can DuckDuckGo it if you care about your internet privacy. You can go and look at it, it's available, it's on the city website, readily accessible. I'll share it with you afterwards. The problem comes in with context. When you read a bylaw, and there's good case law now pertaining to action taken by the SPCA, where there was a dispute over particular clauses, the court said very clearly you must read a law in the context of the entire law, of the entire section. You cannot read individual clauses out of context.So when you start that section, the first section, section one, says that in that chapter the following relates to the number of animals you might own on your property: two in a flat, three in a small house, four in a larger property, six on a small holding, subject to sections, which is about applying for exemption from that if you have more animals, or in terms of section five, which deals with breeding. And then it goes on to explain that. And one of the subsections in dispute is subsection five, which says that any animal older than six months requires a permit. And then section six says this permit application must be made in terms of section five, and section five is about breeding. So it is evident from that that the context is for the owning of more animals.However, let me confess that I think this is easily fixable. Some unnecessary confusion has been created about it, and to fix the unnecessary confusion, I think we can fix it with one word: the word "unsterilised" before the word "animals" in subsection five. The moment it started, I wrote to the portfolio committee and said, just in the final version, the bylaw when it's approved, remove the confusion. We know what we intend with this, we have never levied a licence, there is no intention to levy a licence. How do you know the city has no intention to levy a licence? You look at our tariff book. In the tariff book we spell out all the relevant tariffs. We can't levy a tariff that's not in the tariff book. There is no tariff for normal cats and dogs in the tariff book, there's only for additional animals, et cetera. So it's not the intention to do so. So in the final version the bylaw will fix this.And other people have come up with other things we can probably look at, like fostering. If I foster animals, because I do encourage people to foster, I start a...Alec Hogg: Do you like dogs?JP Smith: Yes, a lot. My favourite, my favourite mammals.Alec Hogg: So you're not against people owning dogs.JP Smith: I have three dogs and two cats, I had three cats until recently. And if my property was larger, I would have 80. And if my family weren't more sensible than me, and if veterinary costs weren't so high, I would have many, many more. So the city's bylaws, those provisions in the bylaw haven't changed. They're identical to the last bylaw and the bylaw before that, they haven't changed. How they're organised has changed a bit, and this has created some of the confusion.But it is not our intention. The Constitution is quite weird. In Schedule Four and Schedule Five of the Constitution, it actually says, out of all our powers, for some completely arbitrary reason, in the bottom there in between everything, it says "control dog licensing". It is one of these very specific powers included amongst all the rest of the constitutional provisions. So all the municipalities stopped. When I was younger, we still paid a dog licence, that doesn't happen anymore anyway. Why doesn't it happen? Because it costs the municipality more to gather the dog licence fees than we make. If we could make money from it, I would say, okay, pet owners of Cape Town, you love your animals, would you be willing to pay for a licence for every animal, we take all that money and give it to animal welfare, so it won't cost you a cent. But it's just not feasible to do, because as always there'll be a small group who spontaneously pay, and you'll fight tremendously to get the rest to pay, and in the end it'll cost you more than you make from it. The cost of issuing the licence is more than you gather from it.So what we do instead is we just donate money every year to animal welfare, significantly more than any other city. Geordin is also an animal lover, for which I'm very grateful, and so we have a very strong relationship with the animal welfare sector, specifically the Cape Animal Welfare Forum, which is more than 50 animal welfare organisations that work together. And one of the things they do is lobby us around legislation, so the new animal bylaw is largely written by them. And the only two things in the bylaw that have meaningfully changed, that actually matter here, is the provision around circuses. We've introduced a clause around exotic animals and circuses, which they feel very strongly about, and which the international morality around has changed. And secondly is cart horses, which is a popular thing in Cape Town. There are many communities where cart horses still play a big role, but they can be a menace on the roads, especially when driven by young people who may occasionally be quite reckless. And it is usually the cart horse who comes off worst out of that equation.Alec Hogg: Why do you think this, I suppose it's an election year and in an election year all kinds of funny things happen, but the way you've explained it now has been taken out of context.JP Smith: I quite like some of Willem Petzer's stuff, not all. He has certain ideological views that... I think he was the originator of...Alec Hogg: I think Geordin said something about it.JP Smith: I think he did the first thing that got traction, and then the others fought to climb on the bandwagon at the same time. But his thing did it. I wish he had just contacted me, because occasionally he says stuff and I think, I subscribe to his channel, I have since unsubscribed for what it's worth. And so I'm sorry that he created this confusion, because it begets doubt. I now have people coming up to me and saying, well, what must I now do with my animals, I don't have money. And I fear that needless, maybe malicious, maybe well-intentioned or sincere but unnecessary misinformation may actually make people abandon or surrender animals to animal welfare organisations. So we have said to the animal welfare organisations, if people bring them, tell them, no, no, no, not necessary, this is misinformation, there's not going to be any dog licence, no intention of doing so. You're quite safe with your dog. If anything, we might actually relax the rules a little bit to provide for extra dogs if you're fostering them, because we want people to foster. I helped start the Paws-A-While Animal Adoption Fair on the Sea Point Promenade, where we encourage people every month to come and adopt animals.Alec Hogg: Thanks for clarifying all of that. And two, the corridor that got so much interest here on BizNews, have you made any progress on reducing the problems that occurred there?JP Smith: Yes, this is mainly why I was eager to come and do this interview, I wanted to come and report back to you. Now we're in data-driven mode. So the situation, of course, with the N2 is challenging. I wanted to say, remember when you interviewed me about the N2 and I said to you, part of Geordin's solution is the N2 Edge project: there's the wall, and improving those spaces next to it, which are really bad spaces in any case. That all belongs to SANRAL and some of it to the provincial government. They don't look good and they're unsafe, and pedestrians die plenty on that stretch of road. And you will remember there was a lot of polemic around that again. I said to you the difference between SANRAL, who had built this section of wall already, and us, and the reason SANRAL wasn't getting attacked, is because SANRAL isn't standing for election on 4 November.That aside, I can report back to you that since we last spoke there has been a significant improvement. We're about 60% down on our crime stats now, all in all. And that's very encouraging: from August last year to August this year, 60% down on our crime incidents.Alec Hogg: We had an incidence of hijackings and other issues.JP Smith: Stone throwing, where people have been injured. So all in all, from the beginning of this year until now, we have dealt with 78,000 cases of different things on that road: fines, offences, et cetera. 4,500 motorists who broke down, cars that go and stand, where we go and stand next to them. I get so many letters from people saying thank you, we felt so much safer because somebody came and stood by us. 664 accidents, 2,045 pedestrians walking on the road, which we have fined, because we are trying to slowly curb that. It's very hard, because people don't carry identification. Unlike a motor vehicle that has a licence plate, dealing with a pedestrian is much harder because there's no identification required by law. 181 arrests, 32 reckless and negligent driving, 277 motorists out of fuel, and 327 suspended vehicles. So that's been for these past eight months. And so we're down to a really small number of meaningful cases now, around six.We had some brilliant arrests you may have watched in the media, some spectacular arrests of stone throwers, young kids especially who throw stones. We arrested a whole bunch of juveniles who were involved in stone throwing. On Epping Road, not the N2, we had that group who were throwing stones the whole time and doing smash-and-grabs. After watching SAPS for a long time not being able to impact on it, even though the city improvement district had cameras and were capturing the faces of the offenders, we got involved. My Safety and Security Investigations Unit, hashtag rogue unit, got involved. We tracked those children, the juveniles, we went to ensure that they got arrested. Some of them are still in custody. So we tried very hard to bust that.And then you remember Mr Rudi van den Bergh, whose vehicle was smashed up a week or so ago on Jakes Gerwel Drive, between Langa and Bonteheuwel. My Safety and Security Investigations Unit went to sit and look at that footage. We identified the offender, and on 9 September he was arrested for that offence. He lives in Langa, and we were able to arrest him. So two days ago we managed to make an arrest there. That's the intelligence and investigative part.We're trying to securitise every space, which is not possible, we don't have the resources. We're not New York that can drown our problems in 55,000 cops, we're never going to have those kinds of budgets. So we have to start getting the conviction side right. And these are two examples, on the stone throwing side, where effective investigations and crime intelligence has allowed us to prosecute people attacking innocent people, including the paramedic who lost his life when he climbed out of his car and ran after the people who had dropped him in a smash-and-grab incident on that N2 drive, and then died.Alec Hogg: It does appear as though the technology, you mentioned it was on camera, it is something that Frans Cronje told me about, he came to visit and you showed him how far ahead you are on applying technology to fighting crime. Is that an ongoing issue?JP Smith: So it's something opposition parties often make much of. They talk about "JP's toys" and an obsession with technology. No, it's not an obsession, it's just something you do concurrently. We've increased boots on the ground in the last six years by 2,800. We're improving our command and control, we've massively invested in training, huge investment in training, we've massively invested in partnership. We have 50,000 neighbourhood watch members in our city, 23,000 of them are accredited. We had a mass information session last week. So every lever I can pull...Alec Hogg: 50,000 neighbourhood watch members, it's like you put them all together in Newlands Stadium.JP Smith: The idea got started, you can say thank you to Helen, because when Helen was mayor she started this project. At that stage it was an exclusive provincial competency in the mind of the police and everybody else, and then Helen, as mayor, said, no, we're also going to start up, I can find nothing in law that makes this exclusively somebody else's job, I want to do this, neighbourhood watch is important. I said to her, no Helen, please don't make me spend precious policing resources on neighbourhood watches, it's bottomless. And how wrong I was, over time I became convinced of it.Now we have a strong relationship, we have a special app that they have, a neighbourhood watch app that puts them directly in touch with our control room. 65% of the neighbourhood watchers in the city are trained on that app and are using it. I donate the cell phones of naughty motorists, who drive with their phones, get called, have the phone impounded, and do not collect the phone in the prescribed time, I donate those cell phones to those neighbourhood watchers. We're trying to get the data zero-rated. And so we have a robust relationship with them. We have city improvement districts, more than 50 of them already. We have reserves, the only city in South Africa that has police reservists. So all these tools are helping make an impact as best we can. And technology sits at the centre of much of this, including now the body cams, the dash cams in our vehicles that are helping us catch the scofflaws out on the road, and duplicate number plates and vehicles involved in crimes. And of course our CCTV cameras, our eye in the sky, which is out to tender again. So these technologies all help.Alec Hogg: Are you going to be able to help Helen if she is elected mayor in Johannesburg, given that you have worked together in the past? Would you be seconded? Our municipal manager here in Hermanus has been seconded to George to help there. Would you be seconded? Because safety and security is a serious issue in Johannesburg.JP Smith: So I love my city passionately. I really love Cape Town, to the exclusion of many other things, to the exclusion of investment in my own personal life. I really love my city. But it is such an exciting challenge, Joburg is badly broken in many ways, and I think we can do a lot there. So if she has asked, and I know Helen well enough that when she asks, she asks in a way that sounds more like an instruction, although it's couched in language that could plausibly still be a request. And I think I will be entirely willing, if she wins the city, and there is a means to help her stay involved in Cape Town but spend some time assisting in Johannesburg, and we are busy talking about what that might look like. But I'm not abandoning my city, I do love Cape Town dearly. I would probably perish if I couldn't take my dogs for regular walks. Those walks with my dogs, up and down the mountain, not only keep me fit, but are my psychological sanctuary.Alec Hogg: That's an interesting point, that it's not just Helen Zille who's taking on the Johannesburg challenge, but there's a lot of talk about her pulling in people from the private sector, but other people in the DA too, as I said, like we see here in Hermanus, where a very good municipal manager has been seconded to another part of the country to go and help. Is that something you see more and more of in your party?JP Smith: Helen is actively sourcing good people, she has great people in that caucus, there are some very skilled and knowledgeable people. I helped, went with them to go do an audit on the fire service. The administration, whatever the current coalition format is, PA, EFF, ANC, Action SA, has run that fire department into the ground. It is now devoid of vehicles to an alarming extent.Cape Town has at least two fire tenders per station. In Joburg, we were counting on one appliance shared by two stations. I got to Orange Farm, they didn't have a fire engine. They had a piece of tarpaulin with components of the fire engine on top of it, lying in the engine bay, waiting for the fire engine to come back, because the gearbox had been broken. One of the staff had been waiting a year for the repairs. A fire broke out while we were there, down the road, the fire staff couldn't go and help because they don't have a device that can put water on a fire. And while I was there, one guy said to me, wait, the fire appliance we're sharing with another station is about to arrive. It did arrive. It was a command bus. Now, a command bus is a thing you sit in to command a fire on scene, it is not a device you can use to put out a fire. So they have really wrecked the fire service. And if there's one thing I can say confidently, it's that when Helen ran for mayor in 2006, Cape Town's fire department was entering the same kind of phase. Not quite as bad, but we were getting there. The media still tried to rally Cape Talk and others to make money, to do a fundraiser, because one of our, the now fire chief, who was then less senior, towed a fire engine up the mountain with a tow truck to make the point that the engine wasn't running. And the media started talking about raising money, and that's when Helen became involved, she said to them, I will fix this.We have fixed it. That is now the best-resourced fire department in South Africa, public fire service, by a mile, to the extent that private services can't really get off the ground there, because there isn't a need for them. It can be done, it can be fixed. There's still plentiful staff, in the audit we did we discovered that there's plentiful staff. I was able to gain those insights because there are extremely capable people in the DA caucus, but there is stuff that we can help them with, experiences and processes we've undergone.Alec Hogg: So it can be done.JP Smith: That you do not have to make all the mistakes along the road before you get to the right configuration, and where you can certainly expedite the turnaround by doing the right thing the first time, just as we have learned from international police stations.Alec Hogg: I'll ask this because at the business conference last month it was quite a strong body of opinion, and a number of people said Joburg cannot be rescued, Helen is wasting her time.JP Smith: Can't be defeatist. There are too many people living there, they can't all emigrate or disappear. You have to rescue it, I don't have a choice, it might just take longer.Alec Hogg: So is it the emotion, the emotional side of it? It's another thing to say, what are the facts? And if you apply, you've been around in Cape Town for a long time in the metro, what you did in Cape Town, or in particular under Helen's leadership, if that were to be applied in Johannesburg, is it more than just hope?JP Smith: Yes. So many years ago I had the privilege of meeting the first Latino police chief appointed as a police chief in the US. He subsequently got promoted to federal level, I still have a cup he gave me as a gift standing in my office on a shelf. And he said to me, so JP, politicians fool themselves that they can do a lot of useful stuff. You can actually only do one useful thing: appoint the right people and promote the right people. Now in South African law you actually can't even do that directly, you're not directly involved in appointments, but you do make the most senior appointments. Those are the appointments that matter: your city manager and your executive directors, those are the appointments that matter. And the whole thing starts with them. If you appoint a capable senior manager, he will whittle down the incompetence beneath him over time, not overnight. Helen is not going to fix the show in 12 months, or maybe even 24 months. You're going to see turnarounds towards the second half or the last bit of that first term. It takes a long time to right-size budgets, to start addressing the service failures, to figure out why the roads department cannot produce enough tar and get access to enough tar and have the right staff and the right expertise, and to fix that. It takes a long time to put the competent, capable senior management in your fire and policing services who can do this. And there might already be good people, but just enough rotten apples or incompetent people in between to ruin the show. And the skill is to find those senior competent people. Helen is headhunting a lot all over the country, she is looking at capable people, to bring in those capable people or find them within the organisation and give them a chance to start reversing.Alec Hogg: That's people, and there you are talking about people. Gayton McKenzie and the allegations he made against you personally, what's that about?JP Smith: Gayton and Fadiel are quite obsessed about me, it entertains me somewhat. But it's really rich coming from a guy who says a gangster called him and called him "broo". A senior gangster? No senior gangster calls me ever, and certainly doesn't call me broo. He calls me other words starting with different letters, but he definitely doesn't call me broo.I categorically denied his claim, which was that I worked for Mark Lifman. I have an unbroken employment record. So Mark Lifman, when I became the councillor, the ward councillor for Sea Point, we had a number of bad people in the area. A guy who later got onto council, buying his way into a council seat allegedly, and Yuri Ulianitski and Cyril Beeka and Mark Lifman, and there was a group of bad people operating.Alec Hogg: Lifman.JP Smith: Yes, all the people involved in various criminal enterprises, gangsters, if you want to use that word, certainly people who did not help us get Sea Point fixed. So we had a strategy for fixing Sea Point: myself, the CPF, the City Improvement District, a new station commissioner, which we fought for. And we started to, again, use those levers we could to get rid of the bad apples. One of the bad apples was Mark Lifman. We tried everything in our power to push him out, to limit his impact, to try and close his businesses, his gambling den, to limit his opportunities. This is a man who would attend community meetings and come and sit in the front row and complain about crime. So we identified where he had his tendrils and tried very hard to minimise those and to destroy his business. I recall a phone call I got one night, I went on a raid with some of our Metro Police, they ended up at an establishment of his, which we were raiding, and I got a screaming phone call from him: "I can see you on the camera, you will regret this, you will rue the day," whatever the language was that he used. He went on at me for a while until I put the phone down. So, no love lost, not a good human being, and certainly not somebody who's passing. I never speak ill of the dead, but not a person anybody can mourn.So absolutely false. And yes, I can, because I have an unbroken employment record, show where I've worked over time. I think he's repeating the claims of a homeless guy who now lives on the side of the mountain, who was very involved with the GOOD party at one point. When he was a candidate for the GOOD party some years ago, about five years ago, he made these claims on a Facebook post. At the time I thought of taking action against him.Alec Hogg: So Gayton said you worked for...JP Smith: My lawyers advised that it was a waste of time. He's a person of straw, he ended up back on the street. He had effectively hijacked a hostel for LGBTQI persons and was accused by the local police and neighbourhood watch and others of a whole range of criminal activities involving drug dealing on those premises. So maybe what I'm seeing is a pattern of people willing to make these kinds of allegations. When we were taking guns and drugs off the street in smaller numbers, or from the minions at the bottom of the food chain, nobody cared. Gang bosses don't care about that, it doesn't touch them, they don't care. When we started to mess with the gang bosses themselves, when we started, through the hashtag rogue unit, taking out the implants they had in council, the captured officials and one politician they had in that structure, when that started happening, that changed. From then I became the subject of a lot of their targeted attacks and slurs and smears. The death threats come first, and if you ignore the death threats and they don't faze you, then the smears start. And there are particularly two racial nationalist politicians who practise that.Gayton, and of course the other one, whose name is not said in polite company. No, this... this Adams, the one who was recently suspended from Parliament. So they make these allegations fast and furious all the time. And I have come to believe, because I know what's true and what's not, that if you make an allegation like that you're one of two things: you're either a useful idiot, in other words you're doing some bad person's bidding by repeating allegations as a smear against somebody for them, so you're a bad person, you're a useful idiot, you don't understand the agenda but you're happy to play along with it. Or your nefarious interests align with a bad person, or you are actively involved, you understand what you're doing and you're consciously doing those smears, you're actively lying, you know you're lying, which is maybe the wilder case with both of them.Either way, you're not a good person, you're not fit for public office. Sadly, racial nationalist politics sells, and we'll have to see what the election does. I believe most sensible people understand what is going on, and I've devoted my entire life to making my city better. There is no way I am assisting any gangster. In fact, in the case of Stanfield, we dismantled a large amount of his nefarious business activities, the capture he had been able to achieve, and we cost him billions in the city which we undid from his business. So you can judge for yourself.Alec Hogg: Are you nervous about the election?JP Smith: Polling is steady and stable, I think Cape Town will be fine. As with everything, the longer you are in government the harder it gets to convince people to keep you there, and the anti-incumbency friction is always a thing. People want to see change, it is easy to go to people and say change, but the point is, change from what? Change from the best-run city in the country: the highest level of employment, the lowest level of unemployment by a decent margin, reducing or impacting on youth unemployment, which is very hard to do even for international cities with much better-resourced cities than us. Four consecutive terms of reduction in crime rates, and I'm confident more will come, especially if we manage to tip the investigating powers issue. The highest number of houses built in the country, by the acknowledgement of the ANC's national minister, not us. The highest level of access to basic services. So on every measurable metric, we are the best-run city in South Africa. That's not by accident, we've appointed good and capable, technically proficient people in these departments. But the overall administration, the policies that guide it, are DA policies. And the city runs differently for one very obvious reason: it's governed by a different party from the others, it does not involve the corrupt, transactional parties and pop-up parties that sit and sabotage these other cities and hold them hostage.This is again not just our opinion. Cyril [Ramaphosa] says it to an entire gathering of ANC councillors, he says there are some cities that just run better, they're generally run by the DA, and we should go and learn from them why, how they're doing this. Not to worry, we will come and show you in Johannesburg after 4 [November].Alec Hogg: We haven't touched on the construction mafia. Often when people talk construction mafia, you think KZN, that seems to be where Dean Macpherson has been focusing a lot of his attention. But you've also got a problem in Cape Town with this. How much progress are you making?JP Smith: I think about 26 projects are substantially affected at the moment, six or so that were brought to a complete halt. Another 28 on top of that we have interference, sabotage, shooting, where you have gangsters running up shooting at the site or threatening or intimidating the contractor, trying to extort them for money, to the point where the contractor turns around and says, this is not worth it, I'm out of here. Delft main roads, the road refurbishment project, the very tragic death of Wendy Kloppers at that Symphony Way housing development. These are projects with significant impact, as is the case in several places where we have very serious extortion problems, small gangs of people. So this has cost me 260 law enforcement officers that we brought out now who do escort duty, protection services. So you have a very mislabelled device, a truck called the honeysucker, it's just got hoses that cleans out the toilets, and in front of and behind that a law enforcement vehicle is escorting them.Alec Hogg: Why would there be a law enforcement escort? Who wants to hijack a...JP Smith: For the stuff, for their cell phones or anything of value on this. Do rob the stuff, or hijack the vehicle, if it's the kind of vehicle that can be hijacked, a people mover or an LDV. We also have an anti-hijacking unit, I was out with them a couple of nights ago. They have recovered, what, 400 vehicles now in 10 months. Extraordinary. 180 of those are city vehicles, the rest are private people's vehicles, mostly in Khayelitsha, that's where the vehicles end up, at a series of chop shops and places where they rip out the tracker first and then move the vehicle. One staff member who was hijacked was literally left holding the tracker in his hand. They gave him the tracker after they ripped it out of the vehicle, because they clearly knew where it was, and said, yeah, your boyfriends will be showing up soon, meaning the police.So we have done, if you permit me to step back, when the kidnapping-for-ransom situation broke out, when it was at its worst, the Muslim Judicial Council, because it was mainly Muslim businessmen being targeted, the MJC called a meeting at their offices, and the National Commissioner and the national minister showed up, so too did the provincial leadership, the premier, the MEC, the mayor, myself. And in that meeting I took the gap and I said to the National Commissioner, in front of the cameras, we want to work with you as the city. By the time he got back to his office I had sat in the vehicle and already written my email asking for that in writing, copying in several other people. He responded and said, yes, let's make it happen. And we did, we worked with them and we crushed those syndicates. You don't hear of kidnapping for ransom in Cape Town anymore, touch wood. Those syndicates still exist elsewhere in the country, where it is a major factor.So we then said, okay, well of course we can do the same with extortion, let us help with the extortion. That has not happened. We get invited to a meeting with the extortion statute, every police station is raised, put on the screen, and then we are excused, and whatever happens after that may or may not be useful, but it hasn't impacted on the problem. So absolutely, the construction mafia is a real thing. I've had large new developments come to me and say, can we meet with you, can we meet with your staff. We brought our Information Management Service, IMS, and SSIU, and various other people, SAPS where appropriate, brought them together, and said, okay, explain to them what's going on, where their board meeting is disrupted by people who push their way into the meeting and say to them, you can't do a big development like this safely, you will need effective protection. And then an unsolicited quote arrives the next day from a dodgy security company linked to the extortion syndicate.The King Air [Industria] case, which is now very well documented, it's been all over the media for some time, where that particular gangster's family ended up as the community liaison officer on the construction premises, on behalf of the community. This is often through the so-called business development forums. It's effectively syndicates that push into government, claiming, we are the community and we are going to make sure that community members get jobs, their own people, often criminal persons, and we are going to make sure that you subcontract to us, and demand a certain amount of subcontracting. So it's not often that the gangster will knock on your door and say, I'm a gangster, it is done through various proxies.Alec Hogg: Are you making progress?JP Smith: Yes. There is now definitely a much greater affinity from SAPS. Our new provincial commissioner, Dyantyi, has been working closely with our senior staff, I'm getting extremely positive feedback on how that is working. We are actively working on extortion cases with them now. So I think the tide is turning. We're also working on gang cases with them now in a different way. There is a new project that is afoot, and I think we will see more impactful results than just us running up and down the streets.Alec Hogg: Just to close off with, because BizNews gets everywhere, it's on the internet, people all over the world can look at this. There is a huge flow of tourists to Cape Town. What we've discussed, you are winning the battle against crime, but there's still a lot of crime going on in the city. Why? Why do we have those two things: people are coming, and presumably they aren't being affected by the crime, otherwise they wouldn't be coming in such numbers, but on the other side there is a lot of crime. Is it just outside of the areas that the tourists go to?JP Smith: Crime is very localised. If you see a heat map of crime, it's very localised, it's in specific pockets. So, I said, almost a quarter of your murder rate, or at least a fifth routinely, is gang-related, gang on gang. These happen in very specific... so these do not affect visitors to the city. And so yes, those two sadly can and do coincide, that you have people vacationing in one part of the city, calling it the Riviera of Africa and doing the most flattering videos and content creation for it, and ten kilometres away, significant crime problems in another community. So our resources are focused on those other communities, the bulk, the 1,300 LEAP officers went there, the gang and drug tasking works there, the action unit works there, the work of our SSIU and SIMS is there. So we are focused on the most high-crime-affected areas, whichever political party they voted for, we didn't say, okay, we're only going to deploy in DA areas or whatever, wherever the crime was statistically and empirically determined, that's where we went to work. And we're trying to drive down those figures to the extent that Nyanga is not in the top ten anymore. Nyanga has been pushed well out of that top ten, made significant progress, had such a positive meeting recently with some residents who told me about how much better it is feeling now, how much they trust LEAP.Alec Hogg: What they have there is not evident elsewhere in the country, because a lot of what you're doing is localised, just for character.JP Smith: I think that they see it, I think some of them have family elsewhere, they travel, they speak to family who come visit, who then leave them with certain comments, and often those are repeated to me in meetings. And yes, they're anecdotal, but I do think people have a sense that things are getting better. I hear this in communities, I've been in Gugulethu and Nyanga and Khayelitsha and Langa a lot in these last months, a lot, and I am seeing a very different response to the City of Cape Town and the DA by extension.But with the tourists, we made certain appropriate investments, the provincial government, after they had made the LEAP investment into the highest-crime-rate areas, also made a tourism unit investment. So we have a small tourism unit that targets tourist-related crime in the CBD. Geordin, when he became mayor, deployed a substantial additional deployment in the major CBDs in our city: Mitchells Plain Town Centre, Bellville and Parow, the Voortrekker Road corridor, Wynberg and Cape Town CBD. So that's 100 extra officers in the Cape Town CBD that's working and grinding down those crime problems all the time. And we have a fusion centre there, especially over peak season, that does real-time crime interventions, monitors all of our cameras, works with private security, works with the neighbourhood watchers, works with the city improvement districts, the public safety officers they have, and with our own staff. And through that package of interventions, we have kept our CBD and the areas where the tourists mostly are comparatively safe.Alec Hogg: And businesses, are they coming into the city given the progress you're making?JP Smith: I think business is always at risk. South Africa, like the US, suffered a lot of attrition of main street shopping, we developed a mall culture, people go shop at the mall. Bangate Mall killed Athlone CBD, the Waterfront brought Sea Point Main Road to its knees. So we have the same problems with high street shopping struggling to sustain itself. But the Cape Town CBD is working well, you don't see empty premises, they're rare. And the crime incidents are minor, there's not major crime incidents, people walk around at night. We had a conference, we have a lot of conferences there, and I get to speak to these conference-goers. We had a specific conference on occupational health and safety, I spoke to some of the delegates afterwards and they said it amazed them. Some of them have experience in Joburg, that they could walk around the CBD in the day and even at night and feel safe, and see the public safety officials, see us responding to incidents. It's not perfect, there are crime incidents, but they are comparatively negligible, and we're working all the time to make them fewer.Alec Hogg: JP Smith is the MMC — what does MMC stand forJP Smith: Member of the mayoral committee.Alec Hogg: — for safety and security for the City of Cape Town. And I'm Alec Hogg from BizNews.com.