You see it in the streets and you hear it in the news: the people of the Western Cape are afraid to live their lives. We don’t trust our police and our police don’t do their jobs. We must ask ourselves: how does this affect our communities and what can be done to alleviate the rampant criminality?

The issue of criminality in the Western Cape has often been a sore spot of contention for the ruling DA government. Proponents of its better-than-ANC-governance are almost habitually hit back, perhaps unfairly, with something along the lines of “What about the Cape Flats''.

It is certainly true that the neighbourhoods that we commonly refer to as the “Cape Flats” are rife with crime and poverty, but this speaks to the deeper issue of criminality in South Africa, in particular, SAPS’s inability or unwillingness to protect the people of the Western Cape. SAPS is, after all, the national government’s monopoly of criminal policing.

To establish the severity of the issue at hand, we must understand the extent to which SAPS has failed the people of the Western Cape. Firstly, SAPS is woefully understaffed with 77% of WC SAPS precincts suffering from staff shortages, leaving many of the most vulnerable communities exposed to criminality and minimal capacity to combat it. SAPS is supposed to deploy a minimum of 20,000 operational members.

The reality? 15 327 operational members have been deployed to the Western Cape’s 151 police stations in 2023. A minimum operational staff deficit of 4673. These conditions leave the people of the Western Cape without adequate protection as well as putting impossibly high demands on the operational members that have been left with the task of doing the work of multiple people. Both the police and the people they serve have been thrown into the lion’s den, so to speak.

The result of this short staffing is that it leaves the Western Cape's communities with abysmal police-to-population ratios. Khayelitsha has 1 police officer for every 628 residents, Mitchells Plain has a ratio of 1:535, and Harare is left with 1:879, just to name a few. With so few police trying to protect so many people, the result is seemingly bound to be greater degrees of criminality, and that certainly appears to be the case in the Western Cape.

Over the last 10 years, murder rates have shot up by 43%, sitting at a decade high of 4150. This leaves the Western Cape with a reported murder rate of 56 per 100,000 people. To put that in context: the highest intentional murder rate of any country in the world is Jamaica, sitting at 53.3 per 100,000. This means that if the Western Cape was an independent country, it would be the murder capital of the world.

People all over South Africa are losing respect and trust in SAPS. About 51% of households that experienced housebreaking reported some or all incidences to the police. The percentage of households that reported the incidences to the police decreased from 59,2% in 2021/22 to 51,4% in 2022/23.

If this trend is to continue into 2024, this would mean that we have entered into a year when most people who have their homes broken into, their property and their person threatened, will simply not bother with reporting the incident to the police. Why should they bother? There is little faith in the police from the public, most people understand what the SAPS has seemingly become: an ineffective and broken institution that fails to serve or help the communities it has been tasked to protect. The result of this is a broken public-police relationship whereby only 27% of South Africans have trust in the police in 2021, down from 34% in the previous year.

This lack of trust is not without merit. SAPS has proven again and again that it cannot be trusted with combating criminality both at the provincial and national levels. For example, the detection rate for murder decreased, by 2,2% to an abysmal 12,48%.

To determine the detection rate, the total number of charges referred to court, charges withdrawn before court and charges closed as unfounded were divided by the total number of charges investigated, meaning that for the 22/23 year, only 12,48% of murder charges were investigated by SAPS. How can we expect the public to trust SAPS when 87,52% of murder charges are not investigated or when 75,18% of common robbery charges are not investigated?

The effect of this understaffing and woeful incompetence is that only 37% of South Africans report feeling safe to walk around at night in their area. Just under two-thirds of South Africans live in fear of going outside within their neighbourhoods when the known criminal element of their area is most active. How have we grown to be complicit in our communities being held hostage at night? It’s been a slow cook, but the feeling seems to be that it is reaching a boiling point.

According to the recent Gallup Law and Order Index report for 2023, South Africa has the 5th lowest Law and Order index rating sitting at a meagre score of 59 out of a possible 100, which is lower than the sub-saharan African average of 66, and just one point above The Republic of the Congo. South Africa, once the poster child for regional stability and African development, has now fallen behind its sub-saharan neighbours in regards to enforcing law and order. Something has to change.

We must challenge ourselves and the government to find a solution. What can be done? This is a difficult question to answer, and as such, many people, groups and experts have their own wide-ranging set of ideas. What appears to be a universal consensus is that what is broken cannot be trusted to fix itself: SAPS requires a serious overhaul. 

Perhaps the most relevant proposed solution to the people of the Western Cape is the devolution of power that the Democratic alliance consistently champions as the game changer that will turn the tide against the increasing burden that criminal activity has been putting on the Cape.

The idea has its merits. The DA has proven to be more competent at governing at the provincial level than the ANC, so the logic would follow that they would be better at policing in the Western Cape than the current national government is. There is not a great deal of evidence to challenge this idea; the DA has never governed nationally so there is no clear case of what the DA would do if they had the full powers of a government-backed, fully capable police service.

However, with the current political power needed for drastic change almost entirely reserved for the decision-makers in Pretoria, the DA has been reduced to patiently asking for more power.

Pretoria, amidst calls for federalism or even Cape independence, fears that its power over the people of the Cape would be continually threatened and eroded if it allowed for such devolution. The national government feels that it cannot allow for the precedent of devolution of power and greater regional autonomy to be put into motion.

There is thus seemingly no current path towards devolution via the national government, and the DA is currently unwilling to flex its muscles and test the power of the provincial government. So, as it stands, the DA’s modus operandi for combating the issue of crime in the Cape, as well as several other major problems the people of the Western Cape face, is to do little and ask the national government as firmly as possible to do something.

Will this result in any substantial devolution? The future is unclear, and while thousands of people are being murdered every year in the Cape, the Government of the Western Cape continues to refuse to take substantial action.

The national government seems wholly uninterested in any solutions for the most part - as the Institute of Security Studies reports:

“More telling is the number of official reports in the past decade highlighting key challenges and presenting practical options to improve policing. These include the National Development Plan (2012), Khayelitsha Commission of Inquiry Report (2014), Marikana Commission of Inquiry Report (2015), White Paper on Policing (2016), State of Democratic Policing Report (2017) and more recently, the Panel of Experts Report on Policing and Crowd Management (2018). These apparently lie gathering dust with no independent verification of whether their recommendations have been implemented, and if so, to what effect. Meanwhile, the SAPS faces an ever-deepening crisis.”  

This is a damning indictment of the national government's unwillingness to enact the critical reform and restructuring of SAPS that is desperately needed to address the crippling criminality in the Western Cape. This seeming inaction stifles progress towards solutions and keeps the Western Cape in its current state of seeing its safety deteriorate year-on-year.

Ultimately, what needs to be highlighted is the urgent need for concrete political and practical action to address the rampant criminality plaguing the Western Cape. Whether through devolution or other means, proactive measures are essential to restore safety and trust within the Cape’s communities and to prevent further loss of life and property.

Failure to act quickly and decisively only perpetuates the cycle of fear and insecurity gripping the region. The current status quo of national government ineptitude and provincial government deliberation cannot continue. ‘

The time is ripe for action.

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