By Alice Mminele
Recently Moretele Times received complaints from members of the community that criminals were targeting users of the Wi-Fi hotspots to rob them of their electronic devices.
The City has warned criminals involved in this activities that the full might of the law will be applied.
Public Affairs and Media Relations Officer for the City of Tshwane, Ms Tsholofelo Motsoko, said the City has taken the safety and security of communities seriously and have assigned the Metro Police and the Wi-Fi teams to conduct preliminary assessment on the crime levels at the areas.
“Furthermore, we are in a process of introducing an online crime reporting App called ‘Namola’ (stop the fight) , as an initiative to fight against crime, and report crimes to metro police via SMS and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), which is a text base call from the cell phone to a remote PC. (The commonly used USSD is the *130*321# from FNB used to load prepaid or load airtime), added Motsoko.
She said the ‘Namola’ App was piloted early in February this year and the app allows citizens to be able to alert the Tshwane Metro Police of crimes in progress, immediately sharing the GPS coordinates of the scenes in question with the nearest available officers, thereby drastically reducing response times.
She said the five-week pilot was an astounding success and it became apparent that Namola allowed citizens to be able to report incidents quickly and effortlessly without the need to dial into a call centre. It also gives immediate and accurate information with respect to incidents of crime, especially those pertaining to precise locations. Both citizens and police are able to provide real-time feedback regarding the incidents.
The system also resolves language-barrier problems that can occur when a citizen has to report a crime in progress over the phone.
“Based on the success of the pilot, we have decided to deploy the Namola App across the entire city, installing smartphone devices in all Tshwane Metro Police patrol vehicles, training over 2,000 officers and launching a resident awareness campaign to promote and entrench the use of the Namola App,” Ms Motsoko said.
She added that the City has not necessarily experienced any reported increases of robbery and muggings in the Wi-Fi hotspots. She said in contrast, the City has received accolades on the value of the Wi-Fi-spots to the surrounding small business, and the increase in young people visiting and spending fair amounts of leisure time in the parks, squares, Areyeng stations, schools and other public institutions where the Wi-Fi service has reach.
