The Western Cape already built a second police force. It still answers to Pretoria.

More than 1,100 law enforcement officers now patrol the Western Cape's worst crime hotspots under a programme called LEAP, the City of Cape Town and the provincial government said when they marked that milestone in August 2022. The province and the City had by then spent more than R1 billion building the force from nothing since 2019. Not one of those officers can investigate a murder, make an arrest for armed robbery, or set a single national policing priority, because policing in South Africa belongs to Pretoria alone.

That is the gap at the heart of this argument. The Western Cape already runs what looks, funds and deploys like a police service. It still has no say over the actual police service, the South African Police Service, that decides what gets investigated and where real detectives go.

This is The Cape Case, our daily column on why the Western Cape should run its own affairs. We laid out the full argument for why the Cape wants out in an earlier piece. Today's question is narrower. Who pays for safety in the Western Cape, and who gets to decide what that money buys?

Why does Cape Town need its own force if SAPS already exists?

Because SAPS answers to the Minister of Police in Pretoria, not to the Western Cape premier or the Cape Town mayor. The Constitution lists policing as a function the national government runs, even though Schedule 4 of the Constitution names policing as an area the provinces are allowed to share responsibility for.

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The City and the province built LEAP, the Law Enforcement Advancement Plan, to fill the gap. LEAP officers carry out patrols, checkpoints and crime prevention work alongside SAPS in the province's most violent neighbourhoods, including Delft, Gugulethu, Khayelitsha, Nyanga and Mitchells Plain. In September 2024 the City and the province doubled deployment in six of those hotspots and added a new 120-member reaction unit, TimesLive reported. The province built this second force because the first one, the one it actually pays national taxes toward, does not take instructions from Cape Town.

Who actually pays for policing in the Western Cape?

Here is the money, set against who controls it, line by line.

Nobody has put those five lines next to each other before. Read across the table and the pattern holds every single time. Wherever the Western Cape or Cape Town controls the money, they also raise it themselves. Wherever Pretoria controls the money, the province just pays in and waits.

Why can't the province tell SAPS what to prioritise?

Because the law does not let it. Police Minister Firoz Cachalia unveiled a R127.072 billion SAPS budget in May 2026 as part of what he called a "reset agenda" for the service. SAPS kept its approved staffing establishment at about 188,000 posts nationwide, expected to stay flat for the next few years. None of that number was decided with the Western Cape in the room.

The gap between funded posts and filled ones shows what that distance costs. More than 8,000 funded SAPS posts sat vacant nationwide, IOL reported at the end of September 2026, as recruitment and accountability calls grew louder. If any of those empty posts sit in the Western Cape, the province cannot fill them, move the budget, or redirect a single rand toward the officers it has already trained through LEAP. Pretoria decides when, and whether, to recruit.

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The Democratic Alliance's Western Cape Provincial Powers Bill, tabled by MPL Christopher Fry back in May 2023, asked for exactly this kind of control, over policing, transport, energy, trade and harbours. The Minister of Police's answer has been that devolving SAPS would break the department's "constitutional mandate" to keep policing centralised. Pretoria has mostly said no to handing over any of it, and the Bill still has no date for a resolution.

Isn't local policing just a Cape Town problem to fix locally anyway?

Critics say LEAP already proves local policing works without a change in the law, so why fight for more. But LEAP proves the opposite. The province had to build an entire second force, funded twice over by ratepayers and taxpayers, just to get officers who answer to people the Western Cape actually elected. That is not proof the system works. That is proof of how much it costs to patch around a system that does not.

The province that already raises far more tax than it gets back from Treasury and already runs the cleanest municipal books in the country is also the province footing a second safety bill because the first one is controlled 1,400 kilometres away.

What would change if the Western Cape ran its own policing?

The argument is not that SAPS has failed everywhere. It is that the sphere of government closest to a crime scene, the one that already recruits, pays and deploys over a thousand of its own officers, should be the one setting priorities for the force that matters most. The Western Cape and Cape Town have shown for seven years running that they can build, fund and manage a safety operation from the ground up. The only thing still missing is the legal power to point it.

That power sits in a Bill still waiting on Pretoria's desk, a budget line still decided without a Cape vote, and more than 8,000 empty desks nationwide that the province cannot touch. Hand the lever to the government the Western Cape already trusts to run LEAP, and the province would not be asking for something new. It would finally be allowed to finish the job it started in 2019.

Photo: HelenOnline / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Photo: Husskeyy / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0