Johannesburg Visitors May One Day Stroll the Business District

(Bloomberg) -- International travelers to Johannesburg know the warning: Avoid the Central Business District.

Known as the CBD, the metropolitan area in the South African commercial capital is where robberies are most prevalent, according to an urban safety review for 2018-19.

A Johannesburg celebrity recently told a magazine interviewer the one risky thing he’d like to try is walk through the CBD on a Saturday night holding his mobile phone and emerge with it still in his hand.

Now the South African Police Service, along with provincial and metro forces, say they’re trying to take back control of the city center.

In a series of raids focused on stopping sales of counterfeit goods and related crimes, the joint force rounded up 560 undocumented foreign nationals, confiscated weapons and impounded vans jammed with illegal items for sale.

The crackdown isn’t the first time Johannesburg Mayor Herman Mashaba has targeted foreign nationals in the city. He’s faced criticism in the past for tactics used to evict occupants living illegally in some of the city’s buildings. And the regional police commissioner has accused members of his force of being part of the problem.

This time will be different from past clean-up attempts, the forces said in a joint statement.

“Worth noting was the arrest of seven police officers by their own colleagues for corruption,” they said.

Any clean-up won’t be easy. Just a week ago, police forces were driven back to their vehicles when crowds of street sellers pelted them with rocks. Police said they retreated to avoid bloodshed.

The crackdown will go on.

“We cannot have parallel governance with criminals,” Police Minister Bheki Cele said in the statement. “We will continue to squeeze the space for criminals to zero.”

To contact the reporter on this story: John McCorry in New York at jmccorry@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Merritt at dmerritt1@bloomberg.net, Paul Richardson, John Bowker

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