GOOD Statement by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & City of Cape Town Mayoral Candidate
17 July 2026
Mayor of Cape Town Geordin Hll-Lewis knows that his election promises to establish South Africa’s first Metro Police Detectives will not come to fruition – but that doesn’t matter because making announcement in itself creates the illusion that he is doing something to stop gang violence.
The mayor has honed this strategy of illusion through public announcements-without-action in the housing domain, where the City has sought to create the impression that it is occupied with the delivery of affordable housing in the inner-city and surrounds – while not actually building a single such home.
Cape Town’s crime and housing crises are real. The desperately poor built environments and social conditions in which most Capetonians live are real. These issues require the City’s real and urgent attention, not Geordin-Hill Lewis’ smiling propaganda.
Let’s put the promise of Cape Town’s detective unit into some context. Hill-Lewis knows that he’ll have to convince Parliament to amend the Constitution and the Police Act if he is to get his own detectives – and that that is not going to happen in the short-term, if at all.
He made the announcement after travelling to the crime-ridden and hideously under-serviced township of Delft, with his bodyguards, to address a DA event meant to demonstrate his party’s seriousness about addressing crime. It gave him something to say: The Cape Flats’ dysfunctionality has nothing to do with his administration’s under-delivery; it is purely a failure of policing.
The mayor knows that municipalities’ core responsibilities in post-apartheid South Africa include addressing the ghetto-like conditions inherited from the divided past, which in many instances have since worsened. These responsibilities include addressing overcrowding, the radical infrastructure deficit, the absence of community amenities and programmes, especially for young people, and the failure to incentivise or develop commercial land use to create local economies. It’s much easier to promise a detective unit.
What the law provides
In May 2022, I asked the then-Minister of Justice and Correctional Services a parliamentary question about the legality of the City of Cape Town’s special investigating unit.
Hill-Lewis would do well to carefully read the Minister’s reply. It said Section 64E of the Police Act provided that the functions of a municipal police service were traffic policing, subject to any legislation relating to road traffic; the policing of municipal by-laws and regulations which are the responsibility of the municipality in question; and the prevention of crime.
The reply further confirmed that Sections 64E, 64F and 64H of the Police Act clearly did not afford a municipal police service the power to investigate offences.
In addition Section 199(1) of the Constitution provides that the security services of the Republic consist of a single defence force, a single police service and any intelligence services established in terms of the Constitution.
Section 199(3) of the Constitution provides that security services, other than the above may be established only in terms of national legislation. Section 205 provides that national legislation must establish the powers and functions of the police service and must enable the police service to discharge its responsibilities effectively. Section 206(7) provides for national legislation to create the framework for the establishment, powers, functions and control of municipal police services.
Taken together, what all of this means is that the establishment of a municipal detective or investigating unit would requires an amendment to the Police Act and the Constitution.
Amending national legislation and the Constitution is beyond the purview of a mayor and opposition leader.
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