Morning Chronicle - Cape Town’s Two-Tier Policing System Emerges From Private Funding

In Cape Town, the reality of municipal law enforcement diverges sharply from its written statutes. While the city’s by-laws are uniform across the metro, their application is increasingly determined by who has paid for enforcement and which local mechanisms have been activated to act on them.

This disparity stems from a system established in 2004 under Section 22 of the Municipal Property Rates Act. The legislation allows property owners in specific areas to vote to tax themselves an additional levy. If a majority of owners in a designated zone agree, the council collects this extra rate and transfers it to a nonprofit company that manages a Special Rating Area (SRA), also known as a City Improvement District (CID).

The funds finance "top-up" services that extend beyond standard municipal offerings, including private security patrols, dedicated cleaning crews, and specialized law enforcement officers. While private guards generally possess limited legal powers, some SRAs, such as the Central City Improvement District, have funded a dozen law enforcement officers who are granted specific fining and arrest authorities. Other local SRAs are adopting similar models.

The consequence is a fragmented urban landscape where the "real law" of a public space is defined not by the by-law itself, but by the choices of officers regarding whom to target. In CID-patrolled zones, complaints about activities deemed undesirable—such as sleeping on benches or even neighborhood dogs in areas with specific board concerns—are actively enforced. In other parts of the city, identical complaints are frequently ignored.

Geographers Paasche, Yarwood, and Sidaway, who have studied private policing in Cape Town’s CIDs, describe this dynamic as a rational strategy for displacement rather than resolution. Private security serves small, bounded enclaves, while municipal police must address the city as a whole. The result is what they term a "patchworked public space" stitched around private enclaves of abundance.

When an individual is moved on from a CID-patrolled square, they do not disappear; they reappear in a suburb where no one has paid for enforcement. For those with nowhere else to go, the stakes are severe. Estimates indicate that the number of people living on Cape Town’s streets often exceeds available shelter beds by multiples. A fine for sleeping rough or being "moved on" does not house the individual; it merely determines which neighborhood they must sleep in next.

The system operates without necessarily requiring bad faith. SRAs are accountable to the city, with councillors sitting on their boards, and they deliver tangible results in cleaning, security, and social work. Property owners who pay twice for services have a legitimate expectation of those results. However, the cumulative effect is a city where "equality before the law" has become equality only on paper.

To address this imbalance, three structural changes are proposed. First, the city should publish enforcement data by ward and by by-law, allowing residents to see where fines are issued and where complaints are effectively ignored. Second, CIDs should be required to report how many people their officers move on and where those individuals are believed to go. Third, park and public space by-laws should be pruned of rules that authorities do not intend to enforce universally.

The remaining regulations, after consultation, should be applied evenly and fairly. A by-law enforced only where someone pushes for it and pays for it ceases to be a public law; it becomes a private service.

D.Evans--MC-UK