It’s 11pm and most people in Hanover Park in Cape Town are fast asleep. The crack of gunfire pierces the silence. A father startles awake, grabs his three children and crawls with them under a bed, telling them to keep quiet until the shooting stops. The gunshots are instantly picked up by acoustic sensors installed on buildings in the township. They send an alert to the City of Cape Town’s control room, identifying that the shots were fired from behind a vibracrete wall of a house on Johndown Road. South African Police Service patrol cars are immediately dispatched. In recent weeks five people, one of them a 13-year-old, have been arrested for possession of illegal firearms as a result of this chain of events. In just more than a week in April, 505 rounds of gunshots were fired in 176 separate shooting incidents in one Cape Town neighbourhood. That’s an average of 20 shootings a day. This is the daily reality for tens of thousands of residents. Parents in Hanover Park regularly kee...
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