Visible policing as a strategy has failed in South Africa. Rather than curtail crime, the South African Police Service’s (SAPS’s) strategy of filling the streets with patrollers to discourage criminality has done little more than waste public money while criminals continue to run rampant, according to the Free Market Foundation (FMF), which advocates for the privatisation of visible policing as a more effective option.

Nicholas Woode-Smith, writing for the FMF, said the SAPS has been undermined since 1996 when the ANC centralised police control, removing local autonomy and instituting racial quotas that disrupted experienced ranks and promoted political appointees. This resulted in weakened investigative capacity, widespread corruption, and demotivated officers.

Woode-Smith highlighted South Africa’s ongoing crime issues, including a murder rate comparable to the death toll in warzones, with 85 murders a day. The first quarter of 2024/2025 saw more than 6 000 murders, over 11 500 sexual offences, and over 9 000 rapes.

The SAPS suffers from a chronic manpower shortage, Woode-Smith said. Only 179 000 police officers (as of 2023) must protect over 63 million South Africans, stretched over 1.22 million square kilometres. While 2.84 police officers per a 1 000 people is not necessarily inadequate, “SAPS has proven to be woefully undertrained, underequipped and unmotivated.”

The manpower shortage becomes even more pronounced when it comes to detectives, the FMF added. As of 2024, there were only 22 413 detectives, with vacancies for 8 594 detective positions. SAPS lost over 8 000 detectives between 2017 and 2023.

“Visible policing is meant to be a preventative measure to dissuade opportunistic criminals. But police cannot be everywhere at once. There is no level of resources that would allow the police to visibly police every community adequately. And distracting them with such a task does not prevent criminals, it distracts police from responding to crimes in progress or investigating committed crimes,” Woode-Smith argued.

“Solving crimes is one of the fundamental ways to discourage criminality. When criminals fear that they will get caught, they are truly disincentivised from committing a crime. Visible policing, on the other hand, only serves to delay a criminal for so long as the police are in the area. As soon as they leave, there is no more impediment to commit the crime.

“The police need to end this foolish notion of visible policing and focus all its resources on rebuilding its investigative capacity. The role of SAPS should not be petty patrols, but to respond to crimes, gather evidence, investigate, and put criminals behind bars,” Woode-Smith stated.

That doesn’t mean visible policing doesn’t have a place at all, he added, stating that it is just a strategy that doesn’t work for the police in its current form. But visible policing does work in parts of South Africa – just not when it is SAPS doing it.

There are over 580 000 private security personnel in South Africa, with 2.5 million registered security guards in reserve, Woode-Smith pointed out. That is 9.21 active personnel per a thousand people, and 48.89 reservists. Private security has taken over the role of visible policing across South Africa. Neighbourhoods are plastered with security company signs; booths are setup for guards to monitor the roads.

“And with their incentive to perform well, private security has an average response time of 5 – 15 minutes. I’ve personally had private security reach my home within less than two minutes. The police’s average response time ranges from 15 minutes to over an hour,” Woode-Smith said.

Private security has the incentive to perform its job well. Private security personnel are often more enthusiastic, better trained and more competent than their police counterparts. And with the decentralisation of these companies, they are can spread themselves out over a far wider area than SAPS ever could, he believes.

“Private security is often founded in the areas they patrol, amongst its members. They cultivate great relationships with communities. And even though there is a profit motive, it seems to always be private security helping vagrants or responding to crimes that don’t involve a paying client. The only limitation of private security is that they are only present in more affluent areas where enough residents can afford their services. But this can easily be solved.

“Shift the budget that would be going into ineffective, mass policing and hold transparent tendering processes, where local areas can elect private security to perform patrols rather than the police. Outsourcing this function to companies that have proven to excel at it would free up the police to focus on more effective strategies to combat lawlessness.

“Cops shouldn’t be glorified neighbour watch. They are meant to be the ultimate sword that holds criminals accountable and delivers justice. But as it stands, they are little better than complacent patrollers and bureaucrats. But by privatising visible policing, we can free up our men and women in blue to truly combat the criminal scourge that terrorises all South Africans,” Woode-Smith concluded.

Nicholas Woode-Smith is a political analyst and author. He is the managing editor of the Rational Standard and a senior associate of the Free Market Foundation.