Privatise Visible Policing

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.

Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash

Visible policing as a strategy has failed in South Africa. Rather than curtail crime, the South African Police Service’s (SAPS) strategy of filling the streets with patrollers to discourage criminality has done little more than waste public money while criminals continue to run rampant.

How the ANC destroyed the police

The tragedy of South Africa’s crime rate is that it didn’t need to be this way. After the African National Congress (ANC) came to power in 1994, it should have viewed the police as an essential institution and a fundamental tool to protecting the people they now govern. Instead, the ANC vindictively self-sabotaged the police, reforming them into failures.

The fundamental causes of SAPS’s failure began in 1996, when the ANC centralised police power under the Minister of Police. Provincial governments were denied autonomy over their law enforcement, and central government got the first and final say on all manner of policing.

This centralised control meant that local stations were unable to react to their specific needs and contexts. If corruption, complacency or incompetence occurred anywhere in the hierarchy, it would infect everything. Budgets had to be spread thin across the country, while the Minister wielded his power like a drunk despot handing out favours to loyal vassals.

The police, rather than a protector of the citizenry, became a tool for ideology. Racial quotas decimated the ranks of experienced, veteran police. Leadership was replaced by untrained, political appointments who leveraged their new positions to enable corruption or used their new authority to tread on experienced cops who were now underneath them.

The pressuring of white police officers to leave also destroyed any institutional knowledge that SAPS had. All organisations rely on veteran staff teaching new staff the ropes. But with race quotas pressuring white police to leave, this transfer of knowledge wasn’t allowed to happen.

The ANC’s fixation on Marxism infected its entire view of law enforcement. Rather than seeing criminality as being caused by a variety of factors such as poverty, mental health issues, culture, institutional decay and plain old greed, the ANC chose to believe that Apartheid and poverty were the cause of criminality. It truly believed that its policies would eliminate all incentives for crime. And that visible policing would be sufficient to discourage any remaining criminals.

Detective-work was gutted by the ANC. Prior to the reforms, detectives were under a separate hierarchy – allowing them the autonomy and creativity to investigate not just criminals, but corruption in the police force. Detectives lost this freedom and were placed under the authority of politically appointed police bosses. Simultaneously, funding to train and hire new detectives was minimised. The ANC did not see it as necessary to investigate crimes and bring criminals to justice.

What the ANC caused…

South Africa is one of the rape capitals of the world. We have a murder rate comparable to the death toll in warzones. Every day, 85 people are brutally murdered. Most crimes go unreported and unrecorded, as SAPS is often too lazy and apathetic to fill in the paperwork. Victims don’t see the point in even trying anymore.

But even the recorded crimes are horrifying. The first quarter of 2024/2025 saw more than 6000 murders, over 11,500 sexual offences, and over 9000 rapes.

Gangs act as the true governments of entire communities in the middle of cities. Citizens live in fear of being caught in crossfires of gang shootouts or becoming the victim of a violent initiation. Mafias abuse ill-thought regulations and localisation efforts to extort fortunes from construction developments and even schools.

All this is possible because the ANC government destroyed law enforcement and rejected any notion that the job of the police should be to investigate and punish criminals.

Not enough cops to visibly police

SAPS suffers from a chronic manpower shortage. 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 1000 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. As of 2024, there were only 22,413 detectives, with vacancies for 8594 detective positions. SAPS lost over 8000 detectives between 2017 and 2023.

With South Africa’s apocalyptic levels of crime, we need more cops and more detectives. And they need to be focused on the correct tasks to address criminality.

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.

Despite what the ANC might think, 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.

Privatise visible policing

But that doesn’t mean visible policing doesn’t have a place at all. 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. 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.

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.

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 enoughresidents 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.

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.