South Africa’s policing crisis runs deeper than poor leadership or isolated incidents of corruption. Our director, Ivor Chipkin, recently spoke to BBC News about the ongoing crisis and the upcoming commission of inquiry, explaining that the real issue is systemic political interference, a legacy of state capture that has never truly ended.

In an interview with the BBC World Service on 15 July 2025, Chipkin discussed President Cyril Ramaphosa’s suspension of Police Minister Senzo Mkhunu and the decision to establish a judicial inquiry into allegations of political interference in policing. He traced the roots of the current crisis to the late 1990s, when the professionalisation of the South African Police Service (SAPS), anchored in the 1996 Constitution, was accompanied by a measurable decline in serious crime. But starting in the early 2000s, successive ministers began to centralise command structures and undermine operational independence.

By the end of that decade, escalating factional battles within the African National Congress (ANC) had begun to spill into SAPS. Specialist units were increasingly repurposed as personal security details for rival political figures, eroding the force’s neutrality. Chipkin described the period known as “state capture” (approximately 2008–2018) as a turning point, when political patronage networks became embedded in policing structures. These networks, he argued, continue to frustrate prosecutions and block long-promised institutional reforms.

Against that backdrop, he cautioned that the new judicial inquiry risks becoming “a delaying tactic”, echoing earlier commissions whose findings were never fully implemented. Real reform, Chipkin argued, will require more than policy tweaks: it demands restoring an apolitical senior command, rebuilding detective capacity, and returning essential resources − vehicles, forensic tools, communications − directly to local precincts. Without depoliticising appointments at the top, he warned, technical solutions will amount to little more than lip service.