The DA believes in an “honest and professional policing service”, said Ekurhuleni councillor Mathew Cuthbert.

The march of a few hundred people was aimed to put pressure on the Gauteng provincial government to cancel contracts — which Cuthbert says are still in force — with Bosasa, despite revelations at the State Capture inquiry by Angelo Agrizzi and others.

“We want to put a name to corruption in Gauteng and South Africa as a whole,” Cuthbert said. Considering the blight on leadership across the country, he said the DA would like to see effective improvement in the police service.

“We want the function of the police to be devolved to provinces. As you can see in the Western Cape, we face a heavy (crime) scourge and we are unable to intervene because we only have metro police under our function as a municipality, and not as a province,” he said.

There was a need for specialised units to deal with narcotics, drugs, gangsterism and crime to solve the ills of the province.

Cuthbert also pointed to the fight against corruption within the police service itself. He cited the example of former national police commissioner Lieutenant-General Khomotso Phahlane, who allegedly sanctioned the reappointment of a police officer involved in numerous crimes, from armed robbery in Mamelodi township in 1994 to a cash-in-transit heist in Sasolburg in 2013 and an arrest in January 2018 in connection with looting more than R500,000 from the Crime Intelligence Unit’s secret slush fund.

Former DA leader Tony Leon says the DA has “the best programme and certainly the best track record in terms of safety and security”. He said one of the broken systems of the past decade has been the police service, “but it’s all about getting competent, properly trained people in charge”.

The loss of faith people have in the policing service shows that it has been corrupted at a fundamental level, said Leon.

“Front and centre of the whole State Capture project was the man who oversaw the Crime Intelligence Unit, Richard Mdluli. This says something about the lack of follow-up. Without him, a whole lot of things wouldn’t have happened.”

Leon said that at the micro level there was a need for more effective policing in communities. There was “a great desire to get local police who seem to be more effective than national police”.

He said there was a need to give localised police more power, but this had been strongly resisted “because we have a rather over-centralising government” which was reluctant to surrender any authority.

This had broken the back of the state because it was reluctant to concede powers where local delivery could be most effective, Leon said.

DA supporter Sifiso Shabalala said that better policing was the backbone of the country and without it, there could be no improvement.

“If we follow up on policing, then we are on the right path to suitable change for our people. We need to end corruption and have more job opportunities and learnerships for young people” he said.

Another DA supporter, Simphiwe Msibi, said better policing was a matter of equipping police with skills.

“I think if we can train more police officers and hire more police things will change,” he said. DM