Following the recent arrest of alleged 28s gang boss Ralph Stanfield, there has been a spate of violence sweeping through the Flats, which claimed the life of his cousin Noor Stanfield Stephanus. Law enforcement agencies in the Western Cape have increased their presence in Valhalla Park in the expectation of the breakout of retributive violence.

Stanfield and his wife were recently arrested in connection with various acts of violence, fraud and intimidation connected to a corrupt property deal with the City’s department of Human Settlements that led to the arrest and official termination of the department’s councillor Malusi Booi.

It is well known that increased presence reduces the incidence of violent crime, as does the effective deployment of investigative teams forcracking down on criminal organisations, and the Cape is particularly affected.

Gang-related murders accounted for between 19% and 23% of murders in the Western Cape over a five-year period, and in the most recent available annual crime statistics (2021/22), gang-related murders accounted for 18.6% of all murders in the province. In the first quarter of 2023, there were 110 gang-related murders in Cape Town, accounting for 12.8% of the total murders. In the second quarter, there were 166 gang-related murders, accounting for 17.9% of the total. Gang-related murders were recorded at 54 of the province's 151 police stations, and the top 10 police stations in the Western Cape accounted for 46% of murders in the 2022/23 financial year.

This reflects what locals will know – that Cape Town is safe where it is safe, and deadly for those found in the wrong street at the wrong time, or trapped in poor, high-crime areas.

As a result, the local DA government has made several efforts to put pressure on the problem, such as the specialist Anti-Gang Unit formed in collaboration with SAPS, as well as the LEAP officer program under the metropolitan police.

But the former has been subject to interference from national officials, and the latter is often refused cooperation from SAPS, and lacks powers of investigation as defined by national legislation and the constitution, which gives very limited powers to provincial and local government in this regard.

The proliferation of firearms and organized crime, such as gangs and extortion rackets, contributed to high levels of serious violence in the Western Cape.

But the source of these firearms seems to be in significant part, the police themselves. In several high-profile cases, SAPS have been found to have “lost” weapons caches, or been caught selling them to criminal organisations.

What is worse, this is not low-level corruption, but a systemic and deliberate policy to destroy the Western Cape that has persevered for over a decade.

In 2015, veteran investigative journalist Sam Sole uncovered a 2011 deal struck between the ANC and the Cape gangs at the highest level, which has afforded these gangs protection in exchange for support. And, if the ANC’s longstanding strategy of making enemy territory (i.e., the DA-run Cape)ungovernable is to be taken into account, there is the bonus of making life under the DA painful.

Of course, this has not had an impact on votes. Both Charterist parties, the ANC and EFF, have been on a long decline, and are now too small to be able to cobble together a governing coalition in the province at any point in the future.

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But what has happened, is that the homicide rate in the Cape has become shockingly high. Until 2011/2012, the province had the most rapidly declining homicide rates in the country. But after the deal with the gangs was struck, that trend dramatically reversed, to place us neck-and-neck with the Eastern Cape for the most lethal province in the country.

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Despite this atrocious arrangement, which claims the lives of Western Cape people on a daily basis and protects the most evil among us for spite and political gain, the DA have been slow to act.

While the LEAP officers are a welcome addition to the arsenal of our local government, the opportunity to extend this program to other DA-run municipalities has not been exploited, despite over a decade of opportunity to do so. Nor have they taken advantage of the recent provincial legislative plan from the FV+, the People’s Bill, which would have leveraged loopholes in the constitution and international law to grant the powers to form a real provincial police force.

Instead, the DA have chosen to attack the Bill on contradictory grounds, by saying that the Western Cape is too diverse to be called its own people, while also claiming that if it were, it would be racist to act upon – the bill exploits the rights of distinct peoples to exercise powers of autonomy in governance.

As a result of this hesitance to challenge the established order and rise against the tyranny of a distant and hostile government, thousands of people are dying at the DA’s doorstep.

And for that, it is not merely the ANC that bears responsibility.

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