The Western Cape remains one of South Africa’s most dangerous provinces, alongside Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, when it comes to national murder statistics. Despite an overall 2.7% drop in contact crimes between January and March 2025, murder rates continue to plague the region, with several Cape Town neighbourhoods ranking among the most violent in the country.

Gang activity lies at the heart of much of this violence. The province is estimated to be home to between 90 and 130 gangs, with a combined membership of more than 100,000 people.

It’s a challenge Brigadier Karl Wienand, the newly appointed Commander of the Western Cape’s Anti-Gang Unit (AGU), said he is determined to confront head-on. With 38 years of service in the police force, Wienand officially took over the reins as Commander in 2024, after serving as Acting Head from 2022. He succeeded the unit’s founding commander, the late Major-General André Lincoln, who retired after almost four decades in the force.

Wienand was mentored by Lincoln, and the two worked closely together to establish many of the AGU’s current strategies, structures, and operational frameworks.

He served with the AGU since 2020, and previously stationed at the Cape Town Central command centre.  Wienand brings both deep operational experience and an intimate understanding of the province’s crime dynamics.

His vision, he said, is to strengthen intelligence-led operations, deepen community trust, and disrupt gang structures from the foundation up.

Brigadier Wienand, the man at the helm of the AGU in the Western Cape, has laid bare his strategy for confronting the province’s relentless gang crisis beginning not with bullets and arrests, but with children, community partnerships, and a clear line in the sand against corruption.

“I hate corruption,” he stated emphatically,

“There’s one thing that I hate and that is corrupt police officers. I’m here to do the job, and I would love to see that at the end of the day, there’s a reduction in gang violence in the Western Cape, as well as in the country. And at the same time, the community can have faith again in the police.”

As the leader of one of the most critical law enforcement units in the province, Brigadier Wienand is not blind to the challenges of the AGU’s mandate. But for him, the long-term solution lies in community-centered, preventative strategies beginning with the youth.

“Because in my years of working with the AGU, I witnessed that gangsters are becoming younger, so we need to start with the youth, children,” he explained.

This is why Brigadier Wienand explained that combatting gang violence starts with disrupting recruitment pipelines and offering youth meaningful alternatives.

“If you travel through many of the communities in the Western Cape, you’ll see the truancy, how many kids are on the street, you see that gangsters are becoming younger, gang leaders are recruiting younger members,” he said.

 “So we need to try and deter them from wanting to become, and looking up to gangs as being leader figures, and looking rather at playing sport and saying there’s another option in joining gangs.

“There can be more emphasis on looking at social initiatives, like we take children on awareness campaigns, addressing children at risk or communities at risk. Things like that that we believe that might play an impact on reducing people wanting to become gangs, people wanting to join gangs.”

The AGU is already coordinating with various departments to build these foundations.

“So for example,we meet with the the education department on a monthly basis and there’s a lot of things that we’ve already put in place, but it can only get better.”

Brigadier Wienand is firm in his belief that the AGU cannot tackle gang violence alone.

“I don’t believe that we alone as the anti-gang unit will ever bring down gang violence,” he said. “We can make certain efforts to reduce gang violence, but with a multi-disciplinary approach, that is where I believe that we can make a lot more impact.

“This is why I believe in making use of our counterparts from law enforcement agencies in the City of Cape Town, as well as from our Provincial Oversight Committee, the Education Department, Social Development, all the other role players that should be in the foreground of assisting us, so that every sphere can be held accountable.”

For Wienand, suppression is not the answer.

“I don’t believe that from us, using suppression, you’ll ever stop gangs, because they’ll just grow and the next generation of gangs will just take over.”

On the operational front, Wienand’s unit is split between targeting organised crime syndicates and addressing street-level violence.

“The anti-gang unit got a component from our organised crime department, which is AGU detectives,” he said. “What they do is concentrate more on the organised crime approach regarding POCA, and looking at removing gangs, the gang groupings as such.

“So we would look more at the project and then on station level, we’d look at addressing the street gangs and street violence. That’s the most problematic.”

With 13 high-risk police precincts identified, the AGU has scaled resources, working in tandem with Operation Shanela and Lockdown 3 deployments.

“Those stations, they’ve also been resourced from other visible policing components, including what we call Operation Shanela, as well as the Lockdown 3 that’s here.”

But for Brigadier Wienand, it’s not enough to show up after blood is spilled: the fight must be proactive, not reactive.

While international crime syndicates are part of their concern, Wienand remained tight-lipped.

“Strategies are in place,” he confirmed and said they are working with counterparts from other countries and different governmental spheres.”

Behind the scenes, the AGU is a structured, strategic force, even if the commander himself isn’t always visible on the frontlines.

“I try to police. I want the anti-gang to be like any other normal policing unit in that we’ve got our specific mandate in our taskings and we work accordingly,” he explained. “We do listen to the community and we try to be there for the communities.”

Community crime fighter Byron De Villiers invited the Brigadier to take hands with fighters on the ground.

“This post is as much about the community as it is about combatting crime. He would have to start at the ground level and engage with the communities.”

Western Cape Community Policing Forum spokesperson Rafieq Foflonker also added that the Commander himself must be visible in communities, working alongside CPFs, Neighbourhood Watches, and civil society to rebuild trust, drive prevention, and develop long-term safety strategies.

Western Cape MEC for policing oversight and community safety Anroux Marais confirmed that her department remains a key strategic partner to the South African Police Service (SAPS) in their Anti-Gang Implementation Strategy.

“We continue to support SAPS in gang-priority areas through the deployment of Law Enforcement Advancement Plan (LEAP) officers, who provide critical on-the-ground reinforcement to SAPS.”

tracy-lynn.ruiters@inl.co.za

Weekend Argus 

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