Provincial commissioners need more authority, KZN police chief Mkhwanazi tells Senzo Mchunu

KwaZulu-Natal’s police commissioner has told new Police Minister Senzo Mchunu that the recruitment and structuring of policing should be the purview of provincial commissioners, and should align with provincial needs.

Policing is currently structured at a national level, meaning “we are centralised in terms of constraint”, Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi told the Mail & Guardian during an interview. “It is an organisational challenge that we have at national level that we are trying to unlock.”

Mkhwanazi, who acted as national police commissioner for eight months in 2011/12, said that any way in which police could be capacitated and investigations increased was welcome. But he questioned whether empowering metro police with what would be limited investigative authority was the best response. 

Mkhwanazi’s appeal comes amid Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis’s repeated calls for the “decentralisation and devolution of specified policing functions to the City of Cape Town”.  

Hill-Lewis believes this can be achieved by amendments to the South African Police Service (SAPS) Act. He said he had tried to have discussions with former police minister Bheki Cele about the matter, but did not receive any formal response to repeated correspondence.  

Cele, however, said in public statements that what Hill-Lewis was seeking would require “constitutional amendments”, but the mayor has argued otherwise.

Devolution of policing

Calls for the devolution of policing powers in the Western Cape are not new, with then premier Helen Zille pushing for such and ramping up calls after the outcomes of the Khayelitsha Commission of Inquiry into policing in that township.

Premier Alan Winde has done the same. For the 2019 elections, the Democratic Alliance (DA) erected posters touting “A provincial police service for you”.

The Law Enforcement Advancement Plan (LEAP) was initiated in the City of Cape Town in 2019 — essentially peace officers with limited powers compared with the SAPS and metro police — who assist police in high crime areas and, according to the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), the formation of which was in line with a 2018 Government Gazette.  

Late in 2022, Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi announced the establishment of his own crime prevention wardens, known colloquially as amapanyaza. Hastily appointed in what was viewed as a populist move, the wardens lack the legal authority of peace officers.

The ANC, at various national conferences when it was still the majority government, touted metro police being integrated into the SAPS as a solution to low police numbers, but this would still have been subjected to centralised control.

Mchunu said earlier in August that metro police resources could assist the SAPS, but an actual devolution of power would be investigated in the future. He said he would meet metro police commissioners to discuss the issue.  

Police members who spoke to the M&G, but are not authorised to speak to the media and thus cannot be named, expressed “optimism” that Mchunu’s statements about capacitation were “positive”, but added that Cele had made similar pronouncements.  

There was, however, additional optimism that Mchunu would be able to “cut through red tape”, something Cele seemed “incapable” of, or “unwilling” to do.

Low public trust 

The demand for a quality, trusted police service is urgent. According to the third quarter crime statistics for 1 October 2023 to 31 December 2023, released in February, there are 86 murders, 170 sexual assaults, 88 attempted murders and 66 carjackings daily in South Africa.

Research by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), published in 2022, found that from 1998 to 2021, trust levels in the police remained “relatively low”.

“Not once during this 23-year interval did more than half the adult public say they trusted the police,” said the HSRC. In 2021, the time of the July riots, public trust in the police plummeted to 27%, according to the research.   

In May this year, in a parliamentary reply to the DA, Cele said 5.4 million case dockets were closed without being resolved since the 2018/19 financial year because of insufficient evidence. 

Mkhwanazi is adamant that delegating the recruitment and structuring of police to the SAPS provincial office — “not the provincial government”, he emphasised  — was crucial to quality policing and combating crime. 

He said a significant challenge was provincial commissioners managing operational budgets but lacking control of compensation budgets, which cover salary structuring and benefits.

While he can allocate funds for vehicles, overtime and accommodation, he has no control over salary structures. He said this limitation hindered the ability to recruit and retain essential personnel, as well as to reward high performers or address pay disparities.

If provincial commissioners had control over structuring and compensation budgets, they could better address critical staffing needs by eliminating redundant positions and bolstering essential ones. “It is very, very difficult to get rid of them, so they just stay employed,” he said of underperformers in the service.

The authority to structure comes from the national police commissioner, who delegates to provincial commissioners. Mkhwanazi said he fully understood that with the delegation of additional authority came the need for additional checks and balances to ensure there was no abuse. 

Better policing vs more police stations

He also advocated for provincial commissioners to determine the number of police stations in their areas, emphasising that visible policing is more effective than merely increasing the number of stations.

“Your car becomes your office,” he said, adding that officers patrolling neighbourhoods are more effective than members of the public having to trek to police stations.

“When you are in your home, you must have the comfort of knowing that at any given time there is a patrol car nearby [that can respond to incidents] within five minutes. You [shouldn’t] have to go into a police station.”

This approach aligns with sector policing, a concept introduced to South Africa years ago, but one that requires buy-in from the top echelons, operational capacity, skills and competent management.

Although additional investigative authority for metro police could help the SAPS, Mkhwanazi warned that extensive training would also be required for metro officers.

With additional investigative authority, “those metro police will also need to have access to SAPS systems and have the ability to engage with prosecutors and attend court. They will have to write items into forensic evidence,” he said.

Any arrests made by metro police must be sent to the SAPS, whose overworked and under-resourced detectives are the ones equipped to investigate the cases and ensure they are prosecution ready.  

This could include something as seemingly mundane as a lone operator arrested by metro police for stealing copper piping. A detective faced with murder dockets would rightly prioritise those over petty incidents of crime, Mkhwanazi said.

Jurisdictional scuffles

There would also be jurisdictional difficulties, he said. If, for example, a crime committed in the metro involved suspects living outside the area, the metro police could be hampered, necessitating involvement by the SAPS.

According to Guy Lamb, who chairs the National Planning Commission’s task team on justice, crime prevention and security, there is ample literature pointing to jurisdictional issues leading to scuffles over turf.

Lamb said he understood Mkhwanazi’s reservations.

“SAPS and metro work together on a regular basis, and obviously when it comes to investigating crime, SAPS leads. While metro police will bring capacity support, they are not trained in [investigations] and are not at the same level as police detectives,” he said.

Capacity issues would need to be addressed, said Lamb, which could be done through legislation, but metro police or law enforcement officers would still need to meet the standards set by the SAPS, and would have to be trained by the police service.

Lamb said Mkhwanazi’s frustration with centralised policing powers was also understandable, given that he had served as an acting national commissioner and now worked as the commissioner of a province with a high crime rate.

Resources should be allocated in terms of the problems that are being faced, he said.  

As for the seeming lack of enthusiasm by the SAPS to embrace sector policing, Lamb said it had to do with institutional reform and “reluctance to do something different”.

“SAPS’s approach to crime and policing has always been the crime combat approach, and that has stuck within the crime combatting plan. That has been around since the 90s, and they have shown a reluctance to do any other form of policing, whether it’s problem-oriented policing or community-oriented policing.”

Sector policing was never seriously taken up by SAPS management “because it is a bottom up approach, and that is exactly what Mkhwanazi is trying to point out”, said Lamb.  

He said the pushback would come from the hierarchical nature of the police, which would be reluctant to relinquish decision-making power to provincial sectors.

There had been continued resistance to any form of reform within the SAPS, he said, using the National Crime Prevention Strategy of 1996 as an example.

“The idea had been that police were supposed to work with other government departments, but SAPS didn’t make any effort for that to happen because there were potential budget implications and the loss of a kind of relevance. So, they just pushed their own crime combating strategy, and the 1996 strategy died.”

Efforts to bring in sector policing “took a long time, decades”, Lamb said, and there had never been any efforts to hold SAPS to account in reporting on it. It was viewed as “a nice add-on”.

Lamb was involved in drafting the integrated crime and violence prevention strategy, “which has been sitting with SAPS for quite a while now”.

The strategy was approved by cabinet in 2022.

“But SAPS has delayed launching it because it goes back to the idea that you have to work with other government departments, that to solve crime, you have to address its drivers and its causes at a local level. SAPS doesn’t do that,” said Lamb, adding that with all matters policing in the country, there was also “no money” for implementation of the plan. 

In addition, the SAPS performance management system, which is structured at a national level, was “very problematic”, he said, and created “perverse incentives”. Because officers are measured, judged and evaluated on the number of arrests they make, it is not uncommon for them to take part in what is essentially fraudulent behaviour.

As an example, said Lamb, certain crimes would be misreported because specific categories had to be shown to be decreasing, meaning a murder could be reported as an assault.  

Mkhwanazi said he was “drilling” the idea of sector-specific policing into station commanders. “People don’t need a building” for effective policing, he said. “They need a service.”

All an officer needed to police an area would then be “a piece of A4 paper and a clipboard and pen”, he said. Ideally the information should be captured digitally, but then he would have to go through head office to procure the necessities, which would end up eating into budgets because of inflated prices by “middlemen”. 

To improve policing, he said authority should be rendered to execute what was needed at a provincial level, “and the authority to be able to execute such in terms of resources must follow”. 

“Our performance plans, at the moment, align with national priorities, but there may be priorities in provinces of what the provincial government wants, for example, gang violence in the Western Cape, and political killings in KwaZulu-Natal,” Mkhwanazi said.