Dr Michael Sutcliffe, Sue Bannister and Andrea McGahey
Over the past few weeks, our attention has again been consumed by case after case of gender-based violence in Ekurhuleni.
Let's call it what it is: violence against women. It is a grim reminder of how little has changed since our first democratic elections in 1994. We still live with far too much violence — in our homes, in our state institutions, in our neighbourhoods and communities.
The numbers bear this out. The latest crime statistics show community-reported serious crime nationally down roughly 2% year on year and contact crime overall down 2.3%. On the surface, that looks like progress.
But look closer, and the picture is far less reassuring. Rape cases sat at 9,201 in a single quarter — effectively unchanged from the year before, and equivalent to more than a hundred reported cases a day. Attempted murder rose almost 9%. Common assault rose 2%. Malicious property damage (often the visible edge of infrastructure vandalism and lawlessness) rose 2.6% too.
What is striking, too, when examining the SAPS statistics on crime is that the top 30 stations with the highest levels of crime reported by communities are not the same police stations that have the highest levels of contact crime.
Importantly, 60% of the top 30 stations where police found evidence of crime are not among the stations with the highest levels of community-reported crime. Without understanding why this is so, it does suggest we may not always be putting our best policing resources where the crime is the greatest.
Overall, though, crime may be edging down, but the violence that defines daily life for women, and the disorder that undermines our municipalities, is not.
As South Africa moves toward its sixth democratic local government election, this is the moment to ask what we actually want from local government.
We should be voting for accountable government that delivers services sustainably, promotes social and economic development, builds safe and healthy environments, and genuinely draws communities and community organisations into decisions that affect them.
Good local governance demands approaches that are participatory, consensus-oriented, accountable, transparent, responsive, effective, equitable and lawful. That means municipalities must finally recognise gender-based violence as a local matter, one that begins in the home and runs through the neighbourhood, the community and the locality, and must play an active part in addressing it, not leave it to the police and courts alone.
It starts with how we plan our towns and cities. Spatial development plans should provide safe public transport, shorten the distance between home and work, accommodate informal economic activity, and put services and facilities close to where people live — planning explicitly designed to work better for poor women.
It must also account for children and young people: ThinkChild and PlanChild have already produced practical guidance on child-inclusive municipal planning, offering municipalities clear ways to build children's needs into policy and programmes.
However, spatial planning alone cannot carry this weight.
Municipalities are also struggling under the sheer complexity of their by-laws, chronic shortages of human and financial capacity for enforcement, weak monitoring and response systems, and a rising tide of vandalism, theft and damage to critical infrastructure, including water, electricity, and transport. These failures undercut service delivery, choke economic development and erode public trust.
Local governments everywhere battle similar enforcement and infrastructure challenges; what distinguishes South Africa is the sheer scale of our violence, compounded by the legacy of apartheid-era planning, historical inequality and difficult intergovernmental relationships.
The evidence, both local and international, points away from purely punitive responses and toward a multi-faceted, community-centred model. Problem-oriented, community-based policing has become global best practice, shifting enforcement away from hierarchical, top-down models toward genuine partnership between municipalities, police and residents.
South Africa's own 2016 White Paper on Safety and Security calls for exactly this kind of integrated strategy, bringing in municipal leadership, civil society and the private sector. As SALGA has put it, crime "has multiple causes," and preventing it "is not just a government role"; it requires communities, civil society and public and private institutions working together.
None of this will succeed without capacity. The quality and competence of senior police and justice-cluster officials appearing before the Madlanga Commission should worry all of us; it confirms what residents already experience on the ground. Most municipalities have no basic unit dedicated to by-law enforcement, let alone the institutional capability to coordinate public and private partners around community safety.
We need an adaptable institutional model suited to our own local contexts, and we need enforcement that is evidence-based and intelligence-led, starting with simple crime and incident mapping to identify hotspots and direct resources accordingly.
It also starts with confronting a culture of disrespect for the law itself: people driving through red robots, unreported cable theft, illegal electricity and water connections, vandalised treatment plants, damaged telecommunications and transport infrastructure.
Our legislation already gives municipalities real authority here: from the Constitution through the Municipal Structures and Systems Acts, sectoral laws on water, electricity and building standards, and policy frameworks including the National Development Plan and the Integrated Urban Development Framework.
What is missing is the institutional will to use it: reviewing and consolidating outdated by-laws, embedding infrastructure protection into water and electricity by-laws, and formalising cooperation with SAPS and the courts to ensure offences are actually prosecuted.
Municipalities must also build the local architecture of trust: safety forums linking officials, ward councillors and residents; real partnerships with community policing forums, business improvement districts and civil society; public awareness campaigns on vandalism and civic responsibility; and accessible reporting platforms — hotlines, WhatsApp lines, mobile apps — that make it easy for residents to report what they see.
Community safety cannot remain an afterthought in municipal planning and budgeting. As we head to the polls, we should be demanding that every candidate and every municipality treat it as the priority it is.
* Sutcliffe, Bannister and McGahey are based at City Insight (Pty) Ltd
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Media Group.