In South Africa, security and safety has become an increasingly do-it-yourself affair. With a national service stretched thin, under-resourced, and struggling with systemic dysfunction, it has fallen to local governments, provincial administrations, and private actors to plug the ever widening holes in the country’s public safety net. But instead of embracing this decentralised patchwork without collective cooperation—this necessitates improvisation to keep communities safe. The national government now proposes draft regulations that would cripple one of the few functioning pillars of our crime-fighting apparatus, namely the private security industry.

The proposed amendments to the Private Security Industry Regulation Act read less like prudent oversight and more like an attempt to seize and centralise control at the expense of practicality and efficiency. The regulations aim to limit ammunition without defining reasonable thresholds, ban semi-automatic rifles for tactical teams, prohibit crowd-control tools like rubber bullets, and even demand tracking devices for firearms—a technological leap that exists more in science fiction than in the South African budget. These proposals are deeply disconnected from the realities on the ground, particularly in provinces like the Western Cape, Eastern Cape and Kwazulu-Natal, the most crime ridden provinces, where violence is endemic and the stakes are literally life and death.

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The SAPS Vacuum

At the heart of this regulatory overreach lies a cold hard truth that the South African Police Service (SAPS) is failing dismally. The reasons are well known—staffing shortages, underfunding, underequipped to deal with coordinated crime, poor morale, corruption, politicisation, and a disconnect from their local communities it is meant to serve. The numbers speak for themselves. The SAPS has around 182 000 personnel for a population of over 60 million, and its operational inefficiency is most acute in high-crime urban and peri-urban areas. As opposed to private security with its more than 500 000 active (meaning actual boots on the ground) personnel.

The public’s response has been rational to the failings of the national government, if quietly desperate, to turn to whoever can help. And more often than not, that help comes not from blue uniforms funded by Pretoria, but from branded patrol vehicles dispatched by private security companies or local governments contracting them. That is why the current proposed regulations is even more problematic, since it is crippling one of the few functioning mechanisms of ensuring security and safety, regulations which if adopted, would place ordinary South-Africans at great risk.

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Decentralisation in Action

This is where the Western Cape’s example becomes instructive. The provincial government, has openly acknowledged SAPS’s shortcomings and taken matters into its own hands. The Law Enforcement Advancement Plan (LEAP)—a programme funded by the Western Cape Provincial Government—has put thousands of officers on the streets of Cape Town’s most violent communities. These officers, often working in tandem with local metro police and private security providers, are at the moment not there to supplant SAPS, but to supplement it in a collective and coordinated effort—because the alternative is simply more blood on the streets.

In areas like Delft, Nyanga, and Hanover Park—where gang violence, extortion, and organised crime flourish—the presence of trained, visible security is not optional, but a necessity. And this presence often includes contracted private security firms with tactical capabilities, including the kinds of weapons the draft regulations now aim to restrict.

The City of Cape Town, too, contracts private security in various capacities, from protecting infrastructure to responding to emergencies in informal settlements. Municipalities across the country do the same, whether it’s for crowd control at public events, ward-based patrolling, or community support initiatives. In this context, private security isn’t some rogue force operating outside the public interest—it is the very infrastructure of public safety in the vacuum left by national incapacity. Rather than embracing this model of public-private partnerships, the national government is rather more focused on seizing sole control of the security space, than working together to the benefit of our communities and our families

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Undermining the Local, Empowering the Criminal

To limit the operational effectiveness of private security companies—particularly those offering tactical response services—is to kneecap the very actors that provinces and municipalities have come to depend on. If tactical teams cannot carry appropriate weapons to match the firepower of gangs, there is no parity of arms. If firms are suspended merely for being under investigation—without a finding of guilt—then the system will be open to abuse, delay, and political interference, which are to the detriment of our local communities and inner cities.

Worse still, these restrictions will have a chilling effect on municipalities’ ability to engage private security services. Who will contract a firm that may suddenly be rendered inoperative by an opaque regulatory decision? How can cities build layered safety strategies around a private sector being actively destabilised by national government?

This is not theoretical. It is already hard enough to police the Cape Flats or parts of Gauteng or the entire country with any consistency. Now imagine doing so with private patrols defanged, disarmed, and demoralised. One can’t help but recognize the irony in these proposed regulations, that the national government would rather crack down on private security and their abilities to prevent crime than to crack down on the very criminals perpetrating the crimes.

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Central Control vs Community Safety

The draft regulations expose a central contradiction in South African governance, that the national government insists on retaining exclusive authority over policing, and all other services for that matter, but fails to wield that authority effectively. At the same time, provinces and municipalities—closer to both the problem and the people—are left to improvise, innovate, and intervene without the constitutional power to fully control policing.

Instead of supporting this de facto decentralisation—by empowering local and provincial actors to coordinate with private security in a transparent and accountable way—the regulations try to drag the whole system back into a failing centre. It is an act of bureaucratic regression dressed up as reform.

In practice, this amounts to a betrayal not only of local governments but of the communities they serve who are powerless to overcome the crime sweeping through their communities. The people who rely on patrols to walk their children to school, who push panic buttons in fear of domestic violence, or who call private security when SAPS doesn’t show up—they are the ones who will suffer dearly.

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A Better Way Forward

If the goal is to prevent abuses in the private security sector, then smart regulation—not stifling control—is the answer. Licensing standards, background checks, transparency in firearm records, and mandatory community engagement mechanisms would do far more to safeguard the public than one-size-fits-all restrictions designed in Pretoria, without the context and insight into the realities of communities across the country.

But perhaps more fundamentally, the national government must accept that safety is a shared responsibility—and that in many parts of this country, it is the local that works, not the central. The draft regulations ignore this reality. They attempt to claw back authority where capacity no longer exists. In doing so, they risk making a difficult situation far worse.

It is time for those at the Union Buildings to realise that security is no longer just a national function. It is local, it is provincial, and it is, unavoidably, private. If the national government cannot lead with competence, it must at least learn to get out of the way and embrace public and private, local and national cooperation. Because it is in the best interest of all South-Africans relying on these partnerships to keep their families and loved ones safe.

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