GOOD Statement by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & Member of the Western Cape Parliament
13 November 2025
*Note to editor: This is a speech delivered in reply to Premier Alan Winde’s statement to the Western Cape Provincial Parliament on the Ombudsman’s Report on Policing in the Western Cape.
It doesn’t really matter to millions of Cape Flats residents who live in daily fear of their lives and their children’s lives whether they’re being let down by the police, City of Cape Town, or Western Cape Government. The fact is that they’re being let down by all three.
The culture of gang violence in Cape Town is a product of history: Social exclusion, spatial injustice, and deliberate under-development. A social and structural fabric that has been inadequately acknowledged and barely fixed.
Children grow up in depressing and dangerous environments that sap their dreams. Poverty is pervasive. The people who have a few coins to rub together often derive their relative wealth from crime. When young people go astray, there are no guardrails. No school psychologists or alcohol or drug treatment facilities. Just a pervasive feeling of hopelessness.
And then, there’s the police. Their questionable integrity is presently on prominent display at the Madlanga Commission and Parliamentary Ad Hoc Committee, and there’s little reason to believe the poison doesn’t impact the Western Cape. Strong evidence of close relationships between apartheid police and gang leaders was presented to the TRC nearly 30 years ago.
The Premier is correct to be livid about the police’s apparent indifference to investigate remarks by a judge three years ago that senior police may have links to organised crime. It could point to ineptitude or corruption, or a combination. The police and IPID, both of whom were to conduct investigations, must please explain.
But… methinks the Premier doth protest too much because this matter contributes to his party’s political narrative that the reason for the season of gun violence, we’re in is because the DA doesn’t control the police.
It’s clever politics ahead of a local government election: What it’s doing is blaming the undisturbed culture of gangsterism in Cape Town on the police, while absolving the province and City of responsibility.
We know from global experience that when people develop pride in their neighbourhood, the space for anti-social activities shrinks.
This government has had a long and uninterrupted spell of leadership, Mr Premier: You have every right to question police failures, but I challenge you to point us to one gang-ravaged ghetto that your government has actually turned around.
I challenge you to explain to the Mitchell’s Plain community why your government couldn’t come up with R2m to save their soccer league a few years ago, with its measurable impact in keeping young people off the streets. Or to explain why, last year, your government saw fit to defund and ultimately shut down the school in Salt River for children who were recovering from trauma.
You shut down these programmes but found Billions to fund the Cape Town Amapanyazas, which have yet to make a blip on quarterly crime stats.
Yes, IPID and the police must account for their inaction; so too should the Province and City.