KAAPSTAD. – Burgemeester Geordin Hill-Lewis het gewaarsku dat die aantal operasionele SAPD-lede in Kaapstad oor die afgelope vier jaar met ongeveer 15% gedaal het, wat die stad toenemend afhanklik maak van sy eie Metropolisie en Wetstoepassing om die “gaping” te vul wat deur onderbemande SAPD-stasies geskep word.
Hill-Lewis het in die raadsvergadering op 30 Oktober gesê Kaapstad het sedert 2021 meer as 1 300 SAPD-lede verloor, terwyl daar meer as 200 ongevulde speurderposte is. “Hierdie syfers is baie kommerwekkend en eintlik skandalig,” het hy gesê en daarop gewys dat die stad se eie wetstoepassingskapasiteit met 1 263 lede toegeneem het en die voertuigvloot nou sowat 360 voertuie meer as die SAPD se vloot insluit.
Die burgemeester het beklemtoon dat hoewel stadsbeamptes onwettige wapens in besit kon neem en verdagtes in hegtenis kan neem, slegs die SAPD die bevoegdheid het om ondersoeke te doen en vonnisopleggings kan verseker, wat beteken dat baie misdade onopgelos bly. Tussen Januarie 2021 en Januarie 2025 het slegs 5% van die 1 670 sake van onwettige wapens wat deur die stad in beslag geneem is, tot veroordelings gelei weens die SAPD se kapasiteitsprobleme.
Hill-Lewis het aangedring op die dringende oordrag van ondersoekbevoegdhede aan munisipale polisie en gesê dat konsepregulasies reeds aan Firoz Cachalia, die waarnemende polisieminister, voorgelê is. “Ons het in die werwing, opleiding en ontplooiing van beamptes belê om die SAPD se las te verlig. Nou het ons die bevoegdhede nodig om te verseker dat beskuldigdes ook verhoor word en veroordeel word,” het hy gesê.
Die burgemeester het ook die onlangse tragiese gevalle van bendegeweld beklemtoon, insluitend die dood van kinders en gewaarsku dat die ineenstorting van die SAPD se kapasiteit ’n direkte bedreiging vir die regstaat in Kaapstad inhou.
Lees die volledige raadsvergadering-uittreksel in Engels hier onder:
Speech extract by Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis from today’s council meeting (30th October 2025)
The officers in our LEAP programme, and our Metro Police and Law Enforcement services perform a critical job of visible policing, crime prevention, and what we call “stepping into the gap” left by a struggling South African Police Service.
But what do we mean by this?
What exactly is the scale of this safety and security void that has been created by the under-staffing and under-resourcing of SAPS stations across the metro, which has increasingly left Capetonians at the mercy of gangsters, drug dealers and extortionists?
If you know me, you will know that I am a numbers and stats guy. I don’t like to make claims and base my actions on perceptions and feelings. I prefer data.
Over the last while we have worked to assemble all of the numbers on SAPS’ deployment levels in our city, using parliamentary replies, public data and police to population ratios.
I must tell you, the results came as a shock. These figures are deeply concerning.
The data tells us that SAPS resources in Cape Town are in steep decline.
Since 2021, the number of operational SAPS officers in the Cape Town metropolitan area has declined by approximately 15%, from 8,668 officers in 2021 to only 7,355 in 2025.
That’s a reduction of more than 1,300 officers over the past four years.
And that’s not coming off a satisfactory base either. We all know that Cape Town’s hardest-hit crime areas have been under-resourced by SAPS for decades. The Khayelitsha Commission of Inquiry into Policing back in 2012 confirmed this.
Since then, Cape Town’s population has expanded rapidly. We are currently the fastest growing metro in South Africa.
But instead of expanding SAPS numbers to meet the shortfall and keep up with our growth, our metro has lost more than 1,300 SAPS officers in just this term of office.
Furthermore, there are more than 200 detective vacancies currently in the Cape Town metro area.
1300 fewer officers than four years ago, and 200 vacant detective posts.
These numbers are deeply concerning and actually outrageous.
It is possible, even likely, that this is the lowest SAPS deployment in Cape Town ever.
While SAPS should be greatly increasing its deployment in Cape Town, it is actually in retreat.
So is it any wonder that SAPS is not able to turn the tide on crime, and why we must constantly be called on to step into the gap?
And what do we mean when we say we are stepping into this gap? Again, I prefer to illustrate this with numbers.
Over the same period – 2021 to 2025 – our own enforcement capacity has grown by an additional 1,263 officers.
We were elected on a specific pledge to “add hundreds of more boots on the ground in Cape Town”, and we have delivered that pledge emphatically, with 1263 new officers so far.
But it is a matter for serious concern that with all the effort we have made, all the funding we’ve invested in new officers, nearly the same number of SAPS officers have been removed over that same time.
While we’ve added 1263 new officers in the City, SAPS has removed 1300 from their deployment.
This means for every officer we have added, SAPS has taken one away.
The sad fact is that the overall total number of officers in Cape Town has not grown at all.
We should be seriously concerned by this.
That is what we mean when we say we’re stepping into the gap to provide a service that is not the constitutional mandate of this sphere of government, but which we cannot ignore in the hope that SAPS will one day recover by itself.
Our duty is to Capetonian families and communities, and that is why we have taken on this critical responsibility, and directed billions of precious ratepayers’ Rands towards safety and security interventions, and many more boots on the ground.
And while the eye-opening stat here is the sharp decline of SAPS numbers against the increase in City law enforcement numbers, this is not limited to human resources.
The City fleet of law enforcement vehicles now outnumbers the SAPS fleet in the Cape Town metropolitan area by around 360 vehicles.
We have 2,433 law enforcement vehicles, while SAPS only has 2,071, of which only 78% are operational compared to over 90% of the City’s vehicles.
Colleagues,
This means that we are edging nearer and nearer to the bizarre scenario in which South Africa’s lead crime fighting agency, the SAPS, actually has fewer resources than a subsidiary, support agency like the Metro Police.
How is this possible? How have things got so bad in the SAPS over time?
Suspended Police Minister, Senzo Mchunu’s testimony before the Madlanga Commission amounted to an admission that SAPS has no workable plan to deal with the gangs on the Cape Flats.
Not a week goes by without a terrible new example of innocent people killed by warring gang members, and very often they are young children who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Like 12-year-old Faizel Challis who was shot and killed in Tafelsig three weeks ago while running ahead to collect party packets for his younger siblings.
And just two days ago a 14-year-old boy was left fighting for his life in Tygerberg Hospital after being caught in gang crossfire in Elsies River, while on his way to school.
No parent should ever have to experience loss like this. And no neighbourhood should ever have to live at the mercy of a relatively small group of violent young men at war with each other over drugs and territory.
We watch the daily testimony at the Madlanga Commission, detailing evidence of serious inappropriate political interference in the management of the SAPS.
We see the work of the ad hoc committee on the state of SAPS senior management.
We see the work done by the acting Minister to uncover the details of the complete and total collapse of SAPS Crime Intelligence, which simply does not exist as a meaningful crime fighting organisation anymore.
We see how most of the SAPS national leadership is suspended or under investigation.
What is happening? Why are we not more up in arms over the collapse of SAPS?
SAPS is the new Eskom, the new PRASA, the new Transnet, all rolled into one. It’s like every other institution in South Africa destroyed by the ANC cadre deployment, corruption and political capture.
And the collapse of SAPS will have far more devastating consequences than loadshedding or broken trains. Because this is people’s lives at stake, and the rule of law itself.
Colleagues,
We cannot fix everything in South Africa from Cape Town.
But we can demand that these resource numbers must be rectified. It is simply unthinkable in the context of violent crime that our communities are living in, that SAPS is withdrawing officers from Cape Town. That is unthinkable, and it must be fixed.
But we’re not holding our breath. We’re getting on with doing what we can do here.
You will know, from various speeches in this council and from our current budget, that we have really accelerated our intervention in safety and security this year.
And in the past couple of months we reached important milestones, first with the graduation of over 700 new City police officers in September and their deployment to every ward in the city, and then the deployment of 40 new officers as part of our new N2 highway unit.
These City deployments will play a critical role in keeping Cape Town’s crime-ravaged communities safer as SAPS numbers collapse.
Arresting criminals and removing firearms and drugs from the streets is just the first half of the task. Then comes the second half, which is securing convictions so that these criminals are put away in prison and don’t return to the neighbourhood to continue their reign of terror.
Our officers are empowered to do the first job, but they don’t have the authority to conduct investigations, gather evidence and build solid, winnable case dockets that can lead to successful convictions.
Currently, only SAPS officers can do that. And they are stretched to breaking point in Cape Town.
The result is that only a tiny fraction of the arrests and confiscations that our officers perform lead to prosecutions and convictions.
Our City policing operations remove around 400 illegal firearms from the streets every year, but most of these will not result in a conviction because the ballistic tests or DNA tests are outstanding, or there was simply not enough evidence gathered.
The lack of SAPS resources, together with a broken criminal justice system, saw convictions secured in just 5% of the 1,670 cases of illegal guns seized by our officers between January 2021 and January 2025.
And throughout all of this, our officers have been available to help – trained, competent and ready to assist SAPS in their investigations.
In fact, we have introduced a special training module to ensure all our officers have the necessary skills in taking down statements and building dockets, given that SAPS Forensic Crime Scene Investigators are often not immediately available to respond to crime scenes.
All we still need is for the Police Minister to grant our City police the powers of investigation so that we can help build cases and make those arrests and confiscations permanent.
Colleagues, you will know that this is something we have often spoken about, and I have directly raised it with three Police Ministers.
We have already drafted the necessary regulations, and I’ve sent them, along with a letter outlining the urgency of the situation and the deteriorating SAPS resourcing in the city, to the Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia on the 20th of this month.
In that letter I explained that the Minister has the authority, in terms of Section 64(F)2 of the SAPS Act, to confer investigative powers on a municipal police service by means of regulation.
This complies with the Constitution, and it is a very efficient way, from an admin point of view, in which to expand investigative capacity.
In fact, Minister Cachalia’s predecessor, Minister Mchunu, used those very powers when he published similar regulations for public comment.
It is a solution with both precedent and practicality, and offers the Minister a way of immediately augmenting the investigative powers of his own officers.
And we know, from his recent meeting with Premier Winde, that he is keen for practical solutions that can enhance collaboration and ease the investigative burden on SAPS.
That is precisely what our draft regulations set out to achieve.
The draft regulations can be published for public comment and enacted within 30 days.
Ultimately, we would still want the more comprehensive devolution of powers through an amended SAPS Act, but until then the enactment of these regulations will go a long way towards alleviating the pressure on SAPS and better serving our communities.
My experience of Minister Cachalia so far is that he is a man who is willing to listen to solutions, and who seems to have an open mind to the principle of devolution.
Colleagues,
When President Ramaphosa praised the City of Cape Town recently, and urged ANC governments to study what we’re doing right here so they might replicate some of those successes in their own cities and towns, we welcomed such collaboration.
I am more than happy to share our learnings and experiences with my peers in other parts of the country.
We can speak about the importance of clean governance and clean audits. We can speak about the level of infrastructure investment it takes to future-proof a city. We can speak about our mega-projects to improve the sanitation network across the metro, or to bring our world-class MyCiti bus service to even more communities.
There are so many success stories we can share, with lessons that can be replicated and scaled up or down to meet the needs of communities elsewhere.
We are doing so much right in Cape Town, and it is a terrible injustice that the one area of delivery where we can only play a supporting role should have such a devastating impact on the lives of our residents.
And as the falling SAPS numbers I revealed earlier confirm, their ability to fight and investigate crime is heading in the wrong direction.
The solution is right here, in front of everyone. We have invested in the recruitment, training and deployment of many additional officers, precisely to ease the burden of an over-stretched SAPS.
Now let’s empower them to not just make arrests and confiscate guns, but also to help put gangsters and criminals behind bars, where they belong.
The ball is very much in your court now, Minister Cachalia. I eagerly await your response.
Thank you.
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