Cachalia outlines strategy to combat Western Cape gangsterism and extortion

Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia has announced a plan to combat gangsterism and extortion in the Western Cape, one built on intelligence-driven policing, multi-agency muscle and community trust.

SAPS’s new anti-gang and extortion strategy aims to tear down silos, link criminal markets through data and deploy flexible task teams to strike at the core of organised crime.

Cachalia and Western Cape Police Commissioner Lieutenant General Thembisile Patekile presented the plan to the National Council of Provinces’ Select Committee on Security and Justice on Wednesday, 8 October, where they outlined their plan to combat gangsterism and extortion in the province.

Flanked by Deputy Police Minister Cassel Mathale and Deputy National Commissioner Tebello Mosikili, the two officials painted a sobering picture of a province gripped by deadly turf wars, where rival gangs battle for control of drug smuggling routes, territorial rivalry for extortion and street-level territory, often leading to a surge of gun-related deaths.

Cachalia further told the committee that there was systemic corruption in the police, and this stemmed from existing loopholes in its procurement system.

“Most often, gangs expand their reach and notoriety by recruiting desperate young people to join their violent franchises. As the gang bosses of the violent gangs get richer, they forge both national and transnational tentacles and have the ability to run their gangs behind prison walls and to infiltrate police intelligence,” said Cachalia.

The acting minister told the committee that in the wake of an outcry over this crisis, he visited the province and met various affected stakeholders and, in the process, got the measure of the challenge at hand, which their strategy sought to address.

At the time, he admitted there was no proper plan to deal with gangsterism in Cape Town.

Read more: ‘No proper plan in Cape Town to deal with gang violence,’ says Firoz Cachalia

He said the crisis “requires the urgent attention of the integrated criminal justice cluster because it’s no longer a social problem, but a threat to our national security. And it should not be used as a narrow partisan rhetoric, but a matter of significant importance”.

The strategy and early successes 

According to Deputy National Commissioner Mosikili, the new strategy forms part of an integrated criminal justice cluster plan, not just a SAPS initiative.

A presentation to the committee outlined a “multi-organised crime” approach, recognising that gang and extortion-related offences were deeply interconnected.

Gangs running extortion rackets were often the same groups, moving drugs and illegal firearms. The same weapons, the presentation noted, were surfacing in taxi violence – a major driver of the Western Cape’s staggering murder rate.

Read more: Western Cape’s ‘killing fields’ highlight devastating impact of illegal guns

“Violence often funds organised crime and cross-border smuggling. By addressing these crimes holistically rather than individually, law enforcement can disrupt criminal ecosystems more effectively. 

“By adopting a multi-organised crime approach, law enforcement can shift from fragmented operations to coordinated, intelligence-driven interventions, ensuring that the fight against crime addresses the full spectrum of threats facing communities and national security,” Mosikili emphasised.

The presentation said SAPS had recently been working closely with the City of Cape Town and community policing forums (CPFs) to combat gangsterism.

It said it had prioritised intelligence-led policing and anti-gang units; violence prevention through youth engagement; major drug crackdowns; and hotspot policing. 

According to SAPS, efforts over the past few months have led to notable arrests recorded, which include 17 gang affiliates. The following progress has been recorded from 1 April 2025 to 30 September 2025.

On the impact of operations progress from 1 April 2025 to 30 September 2025 regarding taxi violence, the committee heard that 41 suspects who were positively linked to the taxi conflict had been arrested and charged, and 14 firearms and three vehicles were seized.

Gang-related murders are up 18% compared with the same time last year, however. 

The committee was also told that specialised investigation teams had been deployed under the Organised Crime Investigation Component to target extortion at construction sites – a lucrative racket driven by the so-called “construction mafia” that has crippled projects and intimidated contractors across the province.

Corruption and collusion within law enforcement, political circles, non-state actors and even elements of the justice system continue to cripple efforts to dismantle organised crime.

Briefing Parliament in April this year, Western Cape police boss Patekile warned of the growing corporatisation of gangs, highly structured criminal networks operating as businesses.

“Gangs and organised criminal groupings (including street gangs, prison gangs and extortion gangs) play a dominant role in the narcotics trade, with some having links to transnational groupings.”

Read more: Police bosses roasted while gangs go ‘corporate’ and cops lack resources, proper vetting

Plans include conducting disruptive operations, targeting illegal firearms, and tracing wanted persons.

Committee members pressed the SAPS on how it planned to track progress on the strategy. In response, the acting minister pledged that SAPS would submit quarterly reports to the committee as a means to enforce accountability.

Gangs are complex

According to David Bruce, an independent researcher and Institute for Security Studies (ISS) consultant, the strategy looks sophisticated, and some thought had clearly been put into it.

He said that much attention was being given to recovering firearms, but less to tracing their origins, adding that the SAPS had to be able to say where the illegal guns flooding the Western Cape came from, and shift the focus from seizures to addressing the supply of illegal firearms.

However, the plan included several efforts previously tried, and a key question remained on how to measure its success. 

Dr Simon Howell, a senior research fellow at the University of Cape Town’s Centre of Criminology, said the strategic approach to gangs and extortion had barely evolved in 20 years. The same tactics were recycled under new banners, he noted, which is why the same violent cycles persisted – unchecked and predictable.

“The key here is the way success is measured. If you look at the presentation, the success is being measured in terms of murders, which is one metric, but it is not the only metric, nor is it a particularly engaging metric.

“Gangs are far more complex. If you think about it simply, how can you measure an intervention aimed at drugs and extortion primarily in terms of operation, using the metric of murder? It is like measuring chickens to turkeys. This doesn’t really work,” he said.

City sidelined in extortion probes

On Thursday, 9 October, City of Town mayoral committee member for safety and security JP Smith said the city had been working on accelerating the impact of its enforcement efforts and supporting the SAPS on several fronts, including safety intelligence, information management, and the use of the city’s investigative and surveillance technologies. 

He said that when it came to tackling extortion, the city had been largely sidelined: “We’ve been kept at arm’s length, we don’t play any meaningful role on the extortion side.

“We have tried to be involved; we requested it, but all we get is an invite to an information-sharing meeting. They show us statistics, tell us how many extortion matters are reported to different police stations, and that’s it.”

This exclusion could possibly be linked to two corruption probes in the city, which have led to a series of raids believed to be linked to billions of rands in fraud. 

Read more: Whistleblower sparks police raids as investigations into Cape Town’s R1.6bn tender fraud intensify

Community input lacking

A disturbing revelation emerged from members of CPFs, who said they were left out in the cold when it came to developing the strategy, a crucial omission in the fight against gangsterism and extortion.

On Thursday, 9 October 2025, Bishop Lavis CPF chairperson Graham Lindhorst told Daily Maverick he wasn’t aware of the new anti-gang and anti-extortion strategy, learning of its existence only the day before.

“Resources are always an issue, but more than that, we need to sit down around a table and sort of co-create a plan to deal with the issue we are facing.

“To sit down in an air-con office and ask for input is not the right thing to do. We need to engage each other because my area and my view may be different from another area. So we need input from all the areas and then work out a plan from there,” he said.

Abie Isaacs, chairperson of the Cape Flats Safety Forum, emphasised that the first step should be to establish a formal probe into gun violence. He said a commission of inquiry into gang violence could expose the deeper rot – “who’s feeding the gangs, who’s on the payrolls?” – beyond what the current strategy plan addressed.

“I haven’t seen the strategy plan, so it’s difficult to respond. One concern I have is that the acting minister was bold enough to come out to the community to listen, but why not come back to the same community now? We want to ask why the issues we raised weren’t included in the plan,” Isaacs said.

Delft CPF leader Pastor Charles George said their problem was that they would never get rid of gangs and extortion because “we don’t know who is all involved”.

On the strategy, he said: “I think it is just a dress rehearsal, but in actual fact [it] is not going to work. This is how they operate. A guy sits on the 27th floor and makes a decision for a guy in the streets.

“He has no clue what big fights we go through, has no understanding, and all that he is doing is that he needs to get paid because he got a job to do.” 

Cachalia engaged with CPFs in a virtual meeting on Thursday, where they expressed their frustration at being excluded during the drafting of the strategy. DM