Every hour in South Africa, nearly three people are murdered. Every day, over 500 people are assaulted with intent to inflict grievous bodily harm. On average, 139 rapes occur daily.
These aren’t abstract figures, but reflect the lived experiences of thousands of South Africans and are brutal reminders of lives lost, communities traumatised, and a state struggling to fulfil its most basic promise, to protect its people.
Beyond the thousands who are directly affected, millions live in the realistic fear that they could be next.
The latest crime statistics released for the fourth quarter of 2024/25 make for grim reading. While some categories have seen marginal dips (murder down 12.4% compared to the same period last year) the overall levels of violent and sexual crime remain intolerably high. An improvement in this case does not make the reality any less horrendous. Assault GBH sits at over 180,000 incidents annually. Rape and other sexual offences hover just below 70,000 per year. These numbers are clear indicators of the failures of governance, unfolding in homes, on pavements, in shebeens, and taxi ranks across all nine provinces.
It is clear that our current centralised, bureaucratic, and politically entangled policing model is not working. The time has come to admit that we cannot police a country like South Africa from Pretoria.
Case for decentralisation
This is why Free SA, in its Power to the People Amendment, has proposed a constitutional shift, namely to devolve policing powers to provincial governments. It’s one of three proposed amendments – alongside limiting Cabinet size and curbing state monopolies – that seek to restore accountability, responsiveness, and trust in government.
The principle is rather simple: crime is local and personal, so policing must be too.
Decentralised policing would mean that each province could establish its own police service, appoint its own commissioner, and tailor its strategies to local crime patterns and community needs. It does not mean the national government abdicates responsibility.
National standards, coordination, and strategic functions would remain intact. But the day-to-day reality of law enforcement would be placed closer to the people it serves and only cross-provincial border crimes will be the main responsibility of national police, in collaboration with provinces.
Contextual policing for a complex country
South Africa is not a monoculture, neither is our geography, our demography, or our crime. This diversity of our country is often celebrated but seldom acknowledged when it comes to governance structures. Ideas that have been globally tried, tested, and proven ineffective, are for some or other reason still clasped to the chest by our current governance structures.
A policing strategy that works in Constantia may be utterly inadequate in Khayelitsha or Kuruman. Our crime patterns are deeply regional. Consider the top contributors to murder: Inanda, Delft, Mfuleni. The causes of crime in these areas are as diverse as they are tragic, tavern shootings, gang warfare, intimate partner violence, vigilantism, and opportunistic robberies. But in Sandton crimes looks different. No centralised bureaucracy, no matter how well-intentioned, can design a one-size-fits-all solution to this kind of complexity.
In fact, the latest data shows that most violent crimes occur in public spaces or residences, places where visible, community-trusted policing could make a decisive difference. But instead of empowered local commanders with community knowledge and legitimacy, we get distant national chains of command, rigid deployment models, and top-down interventions that often arrive late or not at all.
Devolution allows for real-time responsiveness, community input, and political accountability at the provincial level. A Premier who appoints their provincial commissioner can be held responsible for policing outcomes. Under the current system, that chain of accountability is muddled, diluted, and too often broken.
International lessons
Again, we are not suggesting that South Africa should venture into uncharted territory. Most democratic countries with comparable diversity or geographic scale employ some form of devolved policing.
In the United Kingdom, the model is particularly instructive. While national agencies handle terrorism and organised crime, local forces such as the Metropolitan Police, which polices Greater London, or Greater Manchester Police report to locally elected Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs). These PCCs set budgets, priorities, and hiring strategies. They can be voted out if they fail to deliver public safety.
Similarly, Canada employs a tiered system where provinces can choose to establish their own police services (like the Ontario Provincial Police), contract with the national Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or combine the two. The result is a more flexible, responsive system, with oversight shared between federal and provincial levels.
Even in the United States, where policing is highly localised, state and federal agencies maintain co-ordination frameworks for interstate and national threats. The lesson is clear: localisation does not mean chaos, it means clarity.
It’s clear that devolution is not an all-or-nothing scenario where it’s either a free for all or rigid centralisation. Policy making is more complex than ideological extremes. What South Africa needs is pragmatism that is responsive to realities.
Zeitgeist is shifting
Not long ago, any call for decentralisation in South Africa was met with suspicion and too easily conflated with racial agendas or threats to national unity. Rather ridiculously, those who questioned the ANC’s approach were often called “anti-revolutionary” – which not only begs the question of who exactly the revolution is against, but it also makes mature discourse on how to govern a functioning country rather challenging.
Luckily, the political landscape has shifted. The formation of the Government of National Unity, the breakdown of one-party dominance, and rising demands for competent governance over ideological fidelity have opened space for bold institutional reform.
Across provinces, citizens are demanding more control over local services, be it energy, transport, or safety, and rightly so. So increasingly, they are asking if we pay taxes here, why can’t we keep ourselves safe here?
Free SA’s proposal is not secessionist, nor is it a federalist manifesto. It is a pragmatic, centrist intervention grounded in constitutional principles. Chapter 3 of our Constitution mandates co-operative governance. Chapter 10 calls for efficiency, accountability, and transparency in public administration. And the Bill of Rights demands security and dignity for all.
A policing model that delivers none of these is not just broken but it is unconstitutional in spirit, if not yet in law.
Power to the people
We should also be honest that decentralisation is not a silver bullet. No system can erase South Africa’s deep social fractures or economic despair overnight. But a system that allows local knowledge, local accountability, and local trust to flourish is better than one that insists on national control while local violence spirals.
The numbers speak for themselves: 70 murders a day. 139 rapes. Over 500 assaults.
The Power to the People Amendment offers a constitutional path to fix that structure placing policing where it belongs: in the hands of those closest to the problem, and with the most to gain from a solution.
It is time to bring safety home.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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