Cape Town urges Police Minister to expand proposal for more municipal policing powers
12 June 2025
Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis says the City will ask Police Minister Senzo Mchunu to expand his proposal for more powers for municipal police. The Minister this week published new draft regulations for expanded municipal policing powers, with public comment set to run for 60 days from 10 June.
‘We welcome the Minister’s willingness to expand municipal policing powers, but the draft regulations are far too limited. Our officers need more than just the existing powers to search and arrest – they need criminal investigative powers to build prosecution-ready case dockets.
‘These draft regulations are an important opportunity to grant investigative powers so municipal police can gain more convictions, and remove many more criminals from the streets for the sake of long-suffering communities, where the poorest and most vulnerable are hardest hit by gang, gun, drug and extortion-related crime.
‘With investigative powers, we can vastly improve conviction rates for the over 400 illegal firearm confiscations made by City officers annually. Right now the vast majority of these cases do not go to trial due to our broken criminal justice system, with SAPS and the NPA securing convictions in just 5% of the 1 670 cases of illegal guns seized by City officers over the last four years.
‘The City will propose changes to improve these draft regulations, and have already workshopped these with SAPS and other stakeholders at a regional level,’ said Mayor Hill-Lewis.
Alderman JP Smith, Mayoral Committee Member for Safety and Security, said the City has introduced a special training module to ensure all its officers have the necessary statement-writing and docket-building skills in anticipation of the devolution of investigative powers.
‘We believe that our track record has shown that despite limited resources and policing powers, City police have made a massive impact in the fight against crime. With the necessary investigative powers are ready to do much more to improve the unacceptably low conviction rates, which our case-tracking data shows are largely due to the lack of detectives and investigative capacity within SAPS, outstanding ballistics and DNA reports, and slow court and prosecution processes,’ said Ald Smith.
The City continues to invest in growing its policing resources, including:
· Over 1 200 officers deployed to major crime hotspots via the LEAP initiative in partnership with the Western Cape Government
· Further growth of over 1 100 uniformed officers since 2021, including the upcoming deployment of 700 more officers to provide dedicated neighbourhood policing capacity in each ward and to escort service delivery teams in unsafe areas
· A major R800m safety technology investment for smarter policing, including drones, dashcams, gunshot detection, aerial surveillance, CCTV, dashcams, bodycams, automated number-plate recognition, and the digital system to coordinate it all, known as EPIC.
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Published by:
City of Cape Town, Media Office
