The leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA) and mayoral candidate for the City of Cape Town, Geordin Hill-Lewis, promised at a march in Delft today that, if re-elected, he will create the Cape Town Detective Branch to fill the gap left by the police, and gain “the legal power to make sure that gap never opens this wide again”.
Stronger Policing
Hill-Lewis spoke at the march where the DA launched its Stronger Policing pledge, the first of his five-point pledge ahead of the 2026 local government elections.
“Three months ago, four people were murdered on this street. A 13-year-old boy. Three grown men. Shot, execution-style, in a granny flat metres from where we are standing right now. To this day, nobody has been arrested,” says Hill-Lewis.
“I want to say this plainly: the tragedy that happened here was not inevitable. It was not bad luck. We must never, ever accept that this is ‘just how things are’ on the Cape Flats. This is the result of a police service that does not have enough detectives to investigate the crimes committed against you,” he reiterated.
According to Hill-Lewis, what should make every South African angry is that right now, across Cape Town’s police stations, there are close to 200 vacant detective posts. “Detectives who should be investigating gang murders, rapes, robberies — the Zandkloof Street case among them. But these cases are moving slower than they should, or not moving at all, because the person meant to investigate them isn’t there.”
Three ministers
As mayor, Hill-Lewis says, he has worked with three different ministers and asked all of them to give investigative powers to Cape Town’s Metro Police so that they can help the police investigate violent crimes and secure convictions. “Three times those ministers have whispered sweet nothings in my ear, promising me the world and delivering nothing. Three times I’ve thought to myself, surely the Minister of Police wants to beat crime, so this is such an obviously good idea that it will happen — it’s just a matter of time. Three times I’ve been lied to.
“So today I am not just here to march. I am here to announce what we are going to do about it. With your support in November, we will build South Africa’s first Metro Police Detective Branch. We will recruit, train, and deploy dedicated Metro Police investigators to work gang violence, firearms, and drug-related cases. Building the dockets, gathering the evidence, and doing the proper police work that turns an arrest into a conviction,” he says.
