Together with DA Member of Parliament and Portfolio Committee Chairperson on Police, Ian Cameron MP, DA Mayoral Candidate Retief Odendaal MPL, and local councillors, the DA conducted oversight visits at the SAPS Anti-Gang Unit, Flying Squad, and K9 Unit in Gqeberha, said Yusuf Cassim MPL – DA Shadow MEC for Community Safety.

The findings were deeply troubling, Cassim reported. “Across all three units, a consistent picture has emerged. Critical policing capacity has collapsed due to years of mismanagement, bureaucratic paralysis, and neglect by national leadership.”

These failures directly undermine Parliament’s own directives, Cassim said. “In July 2025, the National Assembly adopted my petition for priority intervention in the Northern Areas’ gang crisis, following my submission to the Portfolio Committee on Police. The resolution specifically directed SAPS to address the collapse of the Anti-Gang Unit and Crime Intelligence in Nelson Mandela Bay.”

Considering the oversight visit’s findings, it is clear that those directives have been ignored, Cassim said. Residents of Nelson Mandela Bay, already facing some of the highest violent crime rates in the province, have been left “defenceless.”

The Anti-Gang Unit has only four operational vehicles for 110 visible policing personnel. Of the 29 detectives allocated to the unit, only eight are dedicated members, while the rest share duties across the organised crime unit. Detectives also face vehicle shortages, with just five operational units.

ShotSpotter and mobile surveillance systems, meant to aid in firearm and gang detection, have been non-operational for years.

The Flying Squad, once the city’s rapid-response lifeline, now operates with just one vehicle across the entire metro. The unit has also been without landlines since 2023 due to cable theft.

At the K9 Unit, staff have been cut from 40 to 22. There are only 13 dogs available, and only two of those are trained narcotics dogs, severely hampering the fight against substance abuse and gang-related drug crimes. There are also no high-performance vehicles left in service.

“These findings reflect a collapse in leadership and the erosion of essential public safety infrastructure. SAPS officers on the ground are doing their best under impossible conditions, but they are being failed by the very management tasked with supporting them,” Cassim said.

The Democratic Alliance has requested that Ian Cameron, in his capacity as Chairperson of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Police, table these findings before the Committee and demand urgent national interventions.

“We have also requested that he urgently follow up with the Minister of Police, Firoz Cachalia, on the status of implementation of the directives from the national portfolio committee and demand an immediate national response,” Cassim said.

“The people of Nelson Mandela Bay deserve a police service capable of protecting them, not one crippled by neglect and mismanagement. Until decisive action is taken, violent criminals will continue to act with impunity while honest officers fight an unwinnable battle,” he concluded.

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Much like in medicine, using researched and tested approaches creates greater certainty that new interventions are likely to succeed. This enhances policing methods and promotes efficient allocation of resources. But can these strategies be scaled up across the country and made part of everyday practice?

In 2024 the South African Police Service (SAPS), Western Cape Government and City of Cape Town piloted an evidence-based hotspot patrol strategy in four police station areas in Cape Town. The exercise was carried out with the support of the Institute for Security Studies and Hanns Seidel Foundation. The results were impressive. Violent crimes in hotspots decreased more than five times as much as in areas that received business-as-usual policing.

But these promising results mean little if strategies are not translated into institutional practice. Policing scholars increasingly argue that measuring success should not only involve demonstrating that a strategy works, but showing that it can be integrated into routine operations.

This has led to a distinction between ‘first-generation’ studies that focus on scientific experiments, and ‘second-generation’ research that places greater emphasis on practically embedding new strategies.

Following the success of the hotspots policing pilots, South Africa is tentatively entering a second generation of EBP research and implementation. Rather than just testing strategies, the SAPS, Western Cape Government and City of Cape Town have taken steps towards institutionalising and scaling approaches.

SAPS has incorporated EBP into its Annual Performance Plan and has directed an initial group of 11 stations to adopt the strategy in the Western Cape this year. The province’s Law Enforcement Advancement Programme is also adopting the patrol strategy, and the SAPS, province and city have designed tools to track and measure how patrols impact crime. EBP is also part of the city’s metro police cadet curriculum, with plans to extend training to managers.

However, significant challenges confront the expansion of EBP across the country. In the few locations where the approach has been deployed so far, the focus has largely been on implementing evidence-based hotspot patrols, which are only one of many useful EBP approaches.

What needs to happen to support the broader adoption and institutionalisation of EBP strategies in South Africa?

Researchers globally have grappled with this question, and have identified several critical factors essential to making EBP part of everyday policing. These include leadership support, collaboration with researchers, officer training, access to accurate and reliable data, and cultural change among public safety agencies and scholars.

In South Africa there have been promising developments in this regard. EBP enjoys leadership support at national, provincial and city levels, and police and safety institutions are increasingly open to collaborating with researchers. There is also a growing uptake of EBP training, with the City of Cape Town recently training over 800 new metro police cadets in the approach.

However, more emphasis must be placed on accurate data recording to support the implementation of EBP strategies. This includes ensuring that stations record precise crime location details, such as correct street names and numbers. Reliable information is a prerequisite to adopting evidence-based and data-driven strategies.

Both SAPS and metro policing in South Africa are dominated by strict hierarchical organisational structures that often restrict independent thought and innovation. Effort needs to be invested in fostering critical enquiry and reflective thinking among police officials and supervisors.

A shift is also required among criminologists and researchers, who often lack the skills needed to collaborate effectively and help institutionalise evidence-based approaches. The gaps include poor knowledge of operational practices on the ground and an inability to communicate concepts in plain language.

Researchers also tend to prefer disseminating their findings in academic journals at the cost of building relations with policing organisations and creating entry points for their research. They also need to use communication channels that police officials are likely to read.

When considering the uptake of EBP, it’s important to remember that this is an evolving process rather than a defined goal or achievement. The process entails collaboration, negotiation and dialogue between multiple stakeholders ranging from police officials to crime analysts in various state enforcement agencies, and researchers. These interactions gradually shift attitudes to policing and lead to new strategies, technologies and infrastructures.

By measuring South Africa’s position in the process rather than just focusing on the destination, the country is on an early yet sound path to adopting, refining and embedding evidence-based policing.

Written by Vanya Gastrow, Senior Researcher, Justice and Violence Prevention, ISS Pretoria.

Republished with permission from ISS Africa. The original article can be found here.

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The violent crime crisis in South Africa is well-documented. It is common to hear people from outside South Africa express astonishment at how we manage to survive in a country with violence levels comparable to active war zones. South Africans have grown accustomed to this reality, while their political leaders only pay lip service to the fight against crime.

We must first determine what type of crime we are addressing. In the simplest definition, a crime is anything deemed unlawful by a statute of a particular jurisdiction. For example, if a law prohibits smoking in a private residence used as a home office; smoking in that space would constitute a crime/offence.

A more robust definition of crime stems from natural law and justice, stating that any action that harms or infringes upon another’s rights is a crime. This definition includes offenses like murder and rape, which do not rely on statutes for recognition as crimes.

It is crucial for citizens to understand this distinction. When politicians claim to be combating crime, which crimes are they targeting? Are they allocating resources to apprehend individuals lacking proper permits or signage for their businesses, or are they focusing on murderers, rapists, and thieves?

Due to non-harmful crimes being included in the statute book, resources are spent on prosecuting individuals whose actions are not harmful but are considered criminal for various reasons. This includes arresting and prosecuting individuals for drug possession and/or drug use and even its commercial activity. No matter how reprehensible you may find it when another person consumes drugs, someone else taking them does not harm you in any way. The action of consuming drugs is not harmful to anyone but the drug user themselves.

Given South Africa’s high rates of violent crime, this focus on non-harmful crimes is troubling. It is imperative to concentrate all criminal justice resources on actions that harm others, such as violent crimes, rather than procedural offenses that do not harm anyone.

This means focusing more on the rape and violent assault epidemic, coupled with a murder rate that would make many across the world afraid to venture outside in South Africa at all, and such rampant theft through crimes like housebreakings.

The most effective approach would be for the legislature to consider repealing many of these laws that criminalize actions without causing harm to others. This would streamline the criminal justice system, allowing it to focus solely on crimes that harm individuals.

As citizens, we must consider what matters most to us. Is it more important to arrest an entrepreneur lacking proper documentation, or should our state’s primary focus be eliminating violent crime in our society? Prosecuting non-harmful actions instead of harmful ones will not create a safer or more prosperous society.

The excessive allocation of resources to non-harmful crimes amidst a severe crisis is why the Free Market Foundation’s Section 12 project suggests decriminalisation as a solution to South Africa’s crime problem. Other solutions to dealing with violent crime include a sounder definition of crimes in South Africa, decentralisation of policing powers as it has been shown to improve accountability, and the ability to respond to local context-specific offenses. Developing the capacity of the criminal justice system by increasing funding to enable it to deal with the mammoth task that is our violent crime problem is also part of the solution.

According to the South African Police Service itself at the Khayelitsha Commission, it does not have enough human resources to service the South African populace. Therefore, the most rational thing to do would be to lessen the avenues under which they will be expending their already limited resources. One can only hope that sense will prevail with the current decision-makers, and they will take seriously our violent crime crisis.

Thus, when the next politician you listen to says they promise to fight crime or they are, ask them which crime? Lest you think the state is protecting you whilst it is criminalizing those who harm no one and by virtue of that, letting those who do harm others, walk free.

The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of ProtectionWeb.

Written by Zakhele Mthembu BA Law LLB (Wits), Policy Officer at the Free Market Foundation.

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