Nieuwoudtville News

Nieuwoudtville SAPS No1 Team in the Northern Cape Province Monday, 7 November 2016

Nieuwoudtville SAPS No. 1 Team in the Northern Cape Province

Mandy Schumann

Nieuwoudtville is bursting with pride and wants to share some great news. Our men in blue are the number 1 crime prevention team in the Northern Cape Province and rated third country wide! Police stations are evaluated annually country wide on their performance and for the 2015/2016 financial year, Nieuwoudtville stood out and took the honours. The Hantam area did a clean sweep in the Province, with Calvinia taking second place and Loeriesfontein taking third place.

The Nieuwoudtville SAPS team is led by Station Commander, Captain Vuzumzi Payile (currently on a training course in Pretoria) and includes young recruits from the community who have returned to their home town to train at this station. The team is divided into shifts serving 12 hrs at a stretch. During any events, such as the recent elections, additional hours are put in by everybody. With the festive season just around the corner, policemen and woman all around the country prepare to put in long hours to serve their communities. Nieuwoudtville serves an area stretching from Eselskopvlakte in the north, the farm Soetwater to the east and to the south towards the Provincial Boundary near the Doring River.

A Programme which received special attention during 2015/2016 is the combating of Crime Against Woman and Children. Joint activities were carried out in partnership with the Community Policing Forum. The war on drugs in the community is also a constant priority. This soul-destroying evil and the criminals pedalling it have reached their tentacles into even the most remote rural towns in the Northern Cape. Combating drug and alcohol abuse should be the priority of every resident of every town. Drug and alcohol abuse not only destroys the lives of individuals, but those of their families and in some cases, entire communities. The youth are particularly vulnerable and are targets of drug pushers. The Nieuwoudtville Police, with the support of the Nieuwoudtville community, has taken a tough stance and arrests and the confiscation of marijuana and mandrax tables are amongst the recent successes of the Nieuwoudtville station. Violent crime also showed a decline over the past year.

A key factor to the success of any police station and the police force, is the support the men in blue receive from the community. Without community support, a police force cannot function effectively. Where there are shortcomings, the community needs to point this out and insist on better performance and when great service is rendered by the police force, this must be acknowledged, celebrated and supported. In this age of digital media domination, with bad press mostly stealing the lime light, today we want to tell the world the good news. Positive things are happening around us all the time and it is high time we focus on the good news and the good people making the good news happen. Nieuwoudtville is a small tight-knit community. It is a town where everybody is a neighbour, even if they live on the opposite end of the town, so that any illness, loss or celebration has quite a ripple effect. The Nieuwoudtville Police Station achievement is therefore the pride of the entire community.

Congratulations to the Nieuwoudtville station, as well as to Calvinia and Loeriesfontein. The bar has been set, so let’s all continue to support our police stations and their crime prevention activities, to ensure the Northern Cape maintains its top performance status.

Photograph:

Photographed is the team that was on duty on Monday morning at the Nieuwoudtville Police Station when Chairperson of the Nieuwoudtville Publicity Association, Mandie Kotze, also representing the Woman’s Agricultural Association and Mandy Schumann from the Department of Environment and Nature Conservation and the Nieuwoudtville Farmers Association, visited the station to congratulate them. Nieuwoudtville was ranked the number one station for crime prevention in the Northern Cape, and third country wide for the 2015/2016 financial year.

Front from left to right

M Schumann, M Bok (GW), A Cloete (CLI), JM Ryk (AKII), J Gous (CST), L Koopman (CST), M Kotze.

Back from left to right

D Louw (CST), JM Farao (CST.), RP van der Heeven (SGT), JC van der Linde (SGT), RME Cockrell (CST), L Solani (CST)