Pietermaritzburg – Pietermaritzburg residents are determined to restore safety within communities by ridding their streets of crime.
Through their prevention efforts, a number of perpetrators are now behind bars.
Members of PMB Secure sacrifice their time with families a few nights a week to ensure that crime levels remain minimal, and on weekends visit families to provide hot meals.
Prenay Moodliar, chairperson at PMB Secure, told the “Sunday Tribune” that the initiative began seven years ago when private security companies were still few.
“We decided on this route as our form of giving back to society and as our way of doing community service mainly because citizens cannot progress if safety is not provided, and one's safety is something that's greatly at risk in this country.
“The law allows community members to do crime prevention within its boundaries and we decided to work towards that.
“Once crime gets out of hand in one area, it is very difficult to bring it back down. We wanted to keep crime levels low and to prevent serious crimes,” he said.
Moodliar, who is originally from Ixopo, moved to the Northdale area in Pietermaritzburg about 10 years ago. He said compared to Ixopo, where people know each other, the city was much more aggressive.
At the time, community members were forming neighbourhood watch groups but due to their limitations he wanted to take crime prevention “up a notch and do serious work”.
“We currently have 30 active members who go out into the streets and these are volunteers who are professionals or run other businesses.
“We mostly do operations working full shifts from 6pm to 6am, so we don’t sleep but it is satisfying. We are also now aligned with the SAPS units, PMB K9 in particular and private security companies,”he said.
During operations Moodliar said strength lay in numbers so as to avoid being ambushed or overtaken by criminals.
“We come across a lot of interesting things, unlicensed firearms, stolen vehicles, and once we went to a scrapyard in PMB and we found a stolen car already chopped into pieces. The suspect was caught red-handed and he didn’t expect that,” he said.
PMB Secure’s crime report between January 1 and December 31 2022 reveals that members were instrumental in the city’s successful crime cases. The group recorded being part of 142 arrests, seizure of 14 firearms and other weapons and the recovery of 10 vehicles. Drugs and alcohol recovery includes over 8 000 whoonga tablets, 10kg of uncut cocaine, bottles of cough mixture and mandrax tablets, among other substances.
Moodliar shared said their running feeding scheme was started during the hard lockdown in 2020.
“Many people had lost their jobs and as business owners we didn’t have much as our businesses were also not making money but we wanted to help. We distributed food hampers and hot meals in squatter camps and low-income areas,” he said.
These days only about 40 families and an old age home remain on the group’s list and they continue to receive vegetable biryani on Saturdays sponsored by various businesses.
“We chose vegetable biryani because of the cost factor. Prior to visiting families we do research and verify that they are unemployed. Some who we started assisting in 2020 have now secured jobs and have fallen off the list.”
He said the group would continue to protect residents through their crime prevention efforts. As long as there was crime in the city, they would be around.
“We don’t know where we are going as a country so we will still be there. We will increase numbers, but that is hard because people want to come in with the wrong intentions.”
Simphiwe Sithole hailed the group for its work, saying, “May the almighty God be with you guys. Crime is not a game in Pietermaritzburg. It’s not safe at all.”
SUNDAY TRIBUNE