Food hampers, solar panels looted from trucks

IN SEPARATE incidents two trucks were looted in the past week, one carrying food hampers and the other transporting solar panels.

On Saturday a truck was looted on the N2, M25 interchange.

A 47-second viral video clip shows hundreds of people crowding around the truck and looting its contents – grabbing as many hamper buckets as they could before making off. In the process hundreds of hampers were also damaged and wasted.

Boysie Zungu, metro police spokesperson, said: “People looted before the arrival of the police.

“However, they were chased by the SAPS and metro police and the situation came under control.”

On Monday, a group of people attempted to loot solar panels from an overturned truck on the Umgeni Road interchange next to the N2 highway.

Constable Thenjiswa Ngcobo, a provincial police spokesperson, told IOL news, that a few people allegedly started looting the truck but when the SAPS and metro police arrived quickly at the scene, the crowd dispersed. No case was opened.

Mary de Haas, a violence monitor, said the looting could be opportunistic or a reflection of poverty. But what was important was that much crime stemmed from organised crime, as people stole to, for example, feed drug habits.

“There is also a criminal informal sector system circulating stolen goods which may be at work. But there have been many examples of similar looting of broken-down trucks which will be fuelled by poverty, and even grabbing stuff to sell.

“Poverty does not cause crime, but needing food obviously facilitates it. Poverty does, however, make people recruitable to criminal networks in order to make a living.”

She said this was not a new phenomenon and was likely to continue when delivery trucks break down.

Gareth Newham, a researcher from the Institute of Security Studies, said the looting of hampers appears to be opportunistic given that the truck had broken down.

“While poverty can be one of a number of factors that contributes to certain types of crime occurring, most poor people do not commit crime.”