How To Save The Police
The purpose of policing is not to create the illusion of safety. It is to uphold the rule of law.
It is no accident that crime has flourished in South Africa. The scourge of violence and criminality affecting South Africans lives and livelihoods has been the direct result of the government and the ANC’s misguided policies and corruption.
In 1987, there were 26,000 reported armed robberies. By 2003, there were 126,000. As of 2024, there were 150,000-armed robberies. Murders have skyrocketed year on year. Sexual violence has surged, despite drastic under reporting. And despite the scourge of career criminals, gangsterism and murderers – the biggest source of murders in South Africa is still impulsive acts of violence stemming from arguments.
A functional police force that could deter criminality through investigation and convictions could have stymied the growth of criminality. People are much less likely to act out if there is a threat of arrest. Organised crime would keep to the shadows and not be thriving in the halls of power if there were detectives threatening their operations.
But the ANC intentionally gutted law enforcement as soon as they rose to power in 1994. Experienced police officers were denied promotions and pressured out to make way for undertrained and inexperienced political appointees.
Specialised investigative squads, adept at fighting different types of crime, were gutted as the ANC criticised them as being “too skewed towards white communities”.
Detectives, once able to act independently and dynamically, were put under the power of politically appointed station commanders who were inept and often corrupt.
Now, we have too few detectives, with a single detective on average having to investigate over 100 crimes simultaneously. Some sources report detectives carrying upwards of 500 dockets at a time.
The ANC fundamentally believed that their policies of socio-economic redress would solve the bulk of South Africa’s crime, and that visible police patrols would be the only thing needed to dissuade the remaining criminals. This policy didn’t work. You can’t patrol every square metre of a city 24/7. And even when police do catch criminals, they are so overworked and undertrained, that they often botch the arrest, and are unable to take the case to court to be tried.
What has resulted in rampant vigilantism and the breakdown of the social order in South Africa; mob justice reigns, except where criminal warlords wield even more coercive power.
How do we fix it?
The solution to our flagging law enforcement is to reverse much of what the ANC did in the 90s. We need to decentralise the police force again. Specialised groups that focus on different types of crimes would go a long way to helping solve the crime crisis.
But more than that, we need to decentralise the police entirely. There should not be a national South African Police Service (SAPS). Every province should have its own police department that coordinates nationally but is ultimately accountable to the local government and local communities. This would ensure that corruption doesn’t spread throughout the entire national hierarchy, while also ensuring that local government can hold police accountable.
For national crimes, we should have a national agency like the FBI in the USA that works with provincial police. Despite what we may see in Hollywood, the USA is far safer than South Africa and we should learn from their decentralised model. Even tiny countries like Belgium have decentralised police forces.
On top of decentralising the police, there needs to be a larger onus on coordinating with local communities and private security. The police should not be the primary patroller of the streets. They should be specialised into investigations and bringing convictions.
Community watch, neighbourhood groups, and private security should fulfil the role of patrolling streets to dissuade petty crime and breaking up arguments before they become violent. Rural commando groups should also be equipped to patrol the wider swathes of the countryside to combat farm murders and rural crime. Traditional policing is an urban phenomenon, and we would be foolish to leave our farming population vulnerable.
If we shift the focus from quantity of police to fulfil foolish visible policing strategies, and rather focus on quality, we can train up cohorts of police capable of fighting skilled career criminals, gangs and cartels.
The crisis of South African policing will not be solved by slogans, more visibility campaigns, or another politically connected commissioner. It will be solved by restoring the basic function of policing: investigating crimes, catching criminals, building cases, and securing convictions.
South Africa does not need a police service designed to flatter politicians; it needs police institutions designed to protect citizens.
That means reversing the catastrophic centralisation and politicisation of the SAPS. It means restoring specialised units. It means giving provinces and communities real control over their own safety. It means rebuilding detective capacity, working with private security and community patrols, and focusing the state’s limited resources on the criminals who terrorise ordinary people.
The purpose of the police is not to provide the illusion of safety; it is to uphold the rule of law.
Without that rule of law, freedom is impossible. Businesses cannot operate. Families cannot sleep safely in their homes. Farmers cannot protect their land. Commuters cannot travel without fear. Communities cannot prosper when criminals, gangs, mobs, and corrupt officials wield more effective power than the state itself.
South Africa’s crime crisis was not inevitable. It was made worse by policy; it can be fixed by policy.
But that requires abandoning the ANC’s failed model of centralised, politicised, visible policing, and replacing it with a decentralised, specialised, accountable system built around investigation and conviction.
A free society cannot coexist with criminal impunity. If South Africa wants prosperity, dignity, and order, it must first make criminals afraid of the law again.
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. He writes in his personal capacity.