It could easily have gone unnoticed — a woman’s scream somewhere above Sandy Bay.
The sound reached a dog-walker. He called the Hout Bay community crime ops room. An alert went out on Buzzer, a free mobile app similar to a system used by Israeli police. The hunt began.
Within minutes residents launched drones and formed foot patrols. Response vehicles joined in. A suspect was detected by a security camera, then by a second camera, the images shared instantly on cellphones. Ninety minutes later he was intercepted heading for town.
“I went out myself,” said heavily pregnant Keri Cross of last Friday’s incident, one of many recent attacks in Cape Town’s Table Mountain National Park. “I don’t go out often – I used to, but now I have a child.”
Cross and fellow members of Hout Bay Community Crime Prevention (CCP) are re-inventing crime fighting by harnessing state-of-the-art digital technology, so far with startling success.
Their Buzzer app, launched this year, allows residents to share pictures, video and alerts with each other, and with an ops room linked to 28 response groups and the police. Residents using the app are connected to arguably the most sophisticated civil society crime-fighting initiative to date, which even uses a thermal camera for night patrols.
“We’ve designed a system that allows the community to work together — that is the key,” said Cross, who founded CCP four years ago after a brush with violent crime in a hardware store.
“I walked into my worst nightmare — men with guns who forced us to lie down on the floor. After that I just knew it was time to do something.”
The community initiative was again a talking point this week after the murder of a Russian tourist who had just set off on a mountain hike. Ivan Ivanov was stabbed to death and robbed of his backpack near the East Fort tourist site overlooking Hout Bay last Saturday. Two of the three suspects who appeared in court on Friday in connection with the murder were out on bail at the time of the attack.
Unlike most digital security platforms, Buzzer allows residents to see where an incident has been reported and liaise directly with people in that area. The interface includes several alert categories, from a break-in to a snake and even a burst water pipe.
Buzzer co-founder Jessica Boonstra said the app — which looks set to be adopted by other South African communities — was designed partly by the greater Hout Bay community, including representatives of the leafy suburbs and the townships of Hangberg and Imizamo Yethu.
“We held a workshop to find out how people currently communicate when there are incidents, and we asked everybody what would be an ideal solution,” Boonstra said. An immediate challenge was finding someone willing to produce something accessible to low-income users.
“In the end we found a technology partner in Israel which was already building advanced hi-tech crypto-secured systems for police forces. They were very interested to modify their system to make it work for communities. They’ve been building the tech for us.”
The result is a system that also gathers valuable crime data. Statistics gathered since the CCP began showed remarkable declines in areas where residents focused their attention. In previously crime-riddled Penzance, for example, reported incidents dropped from 25-30 a month to almost zero.
However, CCP staff believe only fundamental reform of the criminal justice system will resolve the problem of repeat offenders, who commit the vast majority of crimes. They say the state’s failure to keep criminals behind bars is by far their biggest challenge.
“It makes our work redundant and puts the entire community at risk,” said CCP operations manager JJ de Villiers. “I know of a case where a guy was out on bail for seven different robberies.”
Hout Bay residents have welcomed the new technology. Posting on the app, Leonie Glaser said: “Buzzer is not only amazing security and makes me feel much safer, it also knots the community a bit closer together.”
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