Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis has called on President Cyril Ramaphosa to commit in SONA to devolving policing powers for City police to investigate gang, gun, and drug crime.
Hill-Lewis said the time has come to end delays in granting more policing powers for City police to help the police and the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) up conviction rates for illegal firearms, drugs, and gang violence cases.
“There is so much preventable suffering in our gang-impacted communities due to extremely low conviction rates for illegal firearm, drug, and gang-related cases. While the acting police minister openly admits that that the South African Police Service (SAPS) don’t have the resources to defeat gangs, our well-trained officers stand immediately ready to help SAPS by building prosecution-ready case dockets to up convictions,” he said.
We now look to the President for a firm commitment on more metro policing powers, and will also look to the courts if needs be.
“In fact, our officers already take over 450 illegal guns off the streets per year, but the conviction rate is just 5% in these cases due to the broken criminal justice system and under-resourced SAPS and NPA. The President and acting police minister have the power to change this situation in various ways. That includes urgent resourcing of SAPS and, most immediately, devolving criminal investigative powers to well-trained City police via the necessary statutory reforms.”
“Despite our best efforts, we’ve been unable to secure an urgent follow-up meeting with the acting police minister despite his presence in our city for SONA this week. We now look to the President for a firm commitment on more metro policing powers, and will also look to the courts if needs be,” said Hill-Lewis.
Draft regulations ‘gathering dust’
The Mayor said the City had gone as far as submitting draft regulations for more policing powers as part of a public participation process last year, but that these are gathering dust on the acting police minister’s desk.
“In the past four months, the City confiscated 119 illegal firearms, made over 4 500 arrests, and took more than 16 000 units of drugs off the streets. We can go further to build dockets and get convictions in these cases, but the president and police minister’s gate-keeping of safety needs to stop.
“Just recently acting minister Cachalia supported the devolution of policing powers for Gauteng crime wardens, but yet we cannot get clear timelines from him on investigative powers for our well-trained and well-resourced City police. This backs a long-standing belief that policing in the Western Cape is being undermined for political reasons.”
We stand with our communities who are under siege in demanding urgent action.
“The City can no longer wait on national government to adequately resource SAPS or address the massive shortage in detectives or backlogs in forensics – we simply have to be allowed to step in and help do these things if we are to achieve the change we need. We stand with our communities who are under siege in demanding urgent action and not merely more delays in decision making while our communities suffer,” Mayco member for safety and security, JP Smith adds.
The City previously released data showing how its policing resources are increasingly overtaking those of SAPS.
The City added 1 263 new officers to the streets from 2021 to 2025—a 48% growth in personnel—while SAPS dropped by an estimated 1 300 officers (15% decline) over the same period. There are also around 560 more City policing vehicles now on the roads compared to SAPS, based on the City’s 2025 fleet data.
A recent parliamentary reply shows that SAPS vacancy rates range from 20-40% across most Cape Town precincts, including 200 vacant SAPS detective posts as of August 2025.
