Watch reports major crime decrease in Tokai

Janice Matthews

janice.matthews@acm.co.za

Despite a significant 36% decrease in reported crime incidents, Tokai Neighbourhood Crime Watch urges residents to maintain vigilance and actively participate in crime prevention initiatives.

Over 50 people attended the Tokai Neighbourhood Crime Watch’s 35th AGM at the Tokai Community Church on Thursday March 6 which highlighted crime statistics and the need for increased community involvement and enhanced security measures.

Crimes reported to police from 2024-2025 had dropped from 105 to 67. This reflects a decrease of 36 percent from 2023-2024, says Mike Marsden, a TNCW exco member.

“The most common crime incident is theft, followed by burglary, trespassing and theft from vehicles. They have all come down quite dramatically, except for theft from vehicles, that’s increased.”

“Serious crimes, like burglary and robberies have come down quite nicely, with a 42% decrease, from 31 to 18. But that is still pretty high compared to our neighbouring watches.”

Observing serious crimes incidents per month, the year started off slowly with one incident in January but leapt up with a series of burglaries in February, March, April and May before it tapered off in winter again. If this pattern continued next year, residents would need to be more careful, Mr Marsden said.

Serious crime incidents happened mainly over the weekend, during the early hours from midnight to approximately 8am. 

Plotting the serious crimes on Google Maps, Mr Marsden said, burglaries and robberies of residential properties appeared to be planned around an easy escape on the M3, while theft, vandalism and trespassing were more opportunistic.

Utilising their camera network, which included private, residential and donated cameras, has yielded valuable results, says outgoing chairman Ed Bain. 

According to Mr Bain, the cameras have been used to track incidents. Registration numbers of vehicles have been supplied to SAPS and vehicles have been added to databases. Additional street cameras are being rolled out in association with a local security service provider, with alerts and access granted to TNCW. 

Mr Bain, who had stepped into the role as chairman in 2021 said he had two objectives; to get the cameras up and running and leaving the chairman role in “competent hands” as he was stepping down but would remain on the exco to establish a camera committee that would also lead virtual patrolling through the camera network.

In her first address as chairman, Tracy Bassingthwaighte, looked at the year ahead. Her goals, she said, would be to increase visibility and community connectedness.

“I'd like to see more crime fighting signage, so that criminals know we're watching. We need to just get TNCW’s brand up in the neighbourhood to show criminals that there is an active neighbourhood watch, camera signs so they know that there are cameras watching them and house decals on all the houses.”

She emphasised the need for more patrollers, especially vehicle patrollers.

“Patrolling is the heartbeat of the neighbourhood watch. We can't be in the eyes and ears without getting out there and patrolling. We want to up our patrol hours and more days of driving patrolling.”

Outcomes of the watch’s first annual crime and community survey were shared in the meeting. 

The survey was run last year to understand residents' views on crime, crime fighting and neighbourliness. The suburb has 2 400 households; respondents to the survey represented only 23% of all households in Tokai and 34% of the watch’s database.

Ms Bassingthwaighte says only 10% of respondents accurately knew whether their crime rate had increased or decreased, which highlighted the need for more consistent crime stat communication and a monthly snapshot with infographics will now being shared by the watch.

The survey found a strong preference for detached or passive security measures. Ms Bassingthwaighte instead encouraged greater involvement from residents.

“When we asked questions about what would make Tokai safer, we saw a lot of respondents asking for more cameras and more visibility of safety security providers as opposed to saying more patrollers. And statistics show that patrolling really changes crime metrics in the neighbourhood.

“We had 62% of our respondents 62% say that they do not want to be contacted with regards to how they can support TNCW or volunteer so that again just reinforces that sense of passive security.”

Given the preference for more passive or detached security measures, the watch would explore the cost and benefits of a security response team.

While it was still “doing those sums” on costs, the survey asked the question, and about 60% of people indicated a positive response towards that idea or contributing to the SRT.

“More likely two different contribution structures where there's a slightly higher one that includes SRT service and a lower one that doesn't include it will be considered.

“The community can opt whether they want the SRT service or not, and SRT will only service the people that are opted to contribute towards it. Watch the space, we'll send out more info in the year as we finalise all the settings.”