By Cobus Steenkamp, lecturer and researcher in police practice at the Nort-West University. 

On 30 June 2026, as South Africa prepares for widespread anti-illegal immigration protests, the South African Police Service will not stand alone. It cannot. The Fidelity Security Group — a private commercial enterprise — is set to deploy 35 000 operational personnel, seven helicopters, and an undisclosed fleet of surveillance drones (the authors view) to assist SAPS in managing the anticipated unrest. Fidelity, it should be noted, also maintains its own independent crime risk assessment capacity and operational intelligence infrastructure. It is, by any institutional measure, a capable organisation.

This raises a question that should unsettle every South African citizen: when a private sector CEO becomes the operational “right hand” of the National Commissioner of Police, what does that reveal about the constitutional fitness of the state?

Wahl Bartman, CEO of Fidelity ADT, will be not merely a “force multiplier” on 30 June. He will be, in practical and operational terms, the in situ national commissioner for the day. The constitutional mandate to ensure community safety — vested exclusively in the South African Police Service under Section 205 of the Constitution — will, on that day, be partially exercised by a company whose primary legal obligation is to its shareholders, not to the South African public.

This is not an indictment of Fidelity. It is an indictment of a system that made Fidelity necessary.

A constitutional betrayal thirty years in the making

The privatisation of public safety in South Africa is not the result of a single policy failure. It has been a gradual process — a slow constitutional haemorrhage spanning three decades — in which the private security industry evolved from a supplementary service into a commercial powerhouse whose core product is the one thing the state is constitutionally obligated to provide for free: community safety.

The consequence is stark and morally indefensible. Safety has become a commodity. Those who can afford it, buy it. Those who cannot, wait — and hope.

A recent Democratic Alliance survey of 1 025 police stations found that 56% were not operationally available at the time of the audit. Not understaffed. Not slow to respond. Unavailable. For the majority of South Africans who cannot afford armed response services, this is not a statistic — it is a daily lived reality. It is the silence that follows a call that is never answered.

How did we arrive here? The deterioration was not accidental. It follows a traceable pattern, visible across at least five compounding institutional failures.
There are five signals of a system in collapse, and below I will explain them with regard to the South African Police Service in more detail. 

Signal One: The stepdown to abandonment

The police-to-population ratio in South Africa stands at approximately 1:427. When measured against the registered private security workforce, the ratio of police to security personnel is 1:3. Synthesised, this produces a sobering figure: one security officer for every 142 civilians — a figure that holds only for those civilians who live in areas with paying clients.

South Africa now has more than 2.7 million registered private security officers, compared to fewer than 150,000 SAPS members serving a population of 62 million. This is not a resourcing challenge. It is the architecture of a parallel justice system — one in which your level of protection is determined not by your citizenship, but by your credit card limit.

As one organised crime expert with more than 30 years in law enforcement has observed: “If you live in a traditional township environment, or in an informal settlement, it is few and far between that you will see security patrols — because they don’t have paying customers.”

The South African Constitution does not contain a means-test for safety. The market does.

Signal Two: The collapse of public trust

Research consistently documents a sustained, multi-decade decline in community confidence in SAPS. Public satisfaction with the police has decreased by at least 8% over the past six years, with the most recent figures placing national satisfaction at approximately 54%. The reasons cited by survey respondents are institutional rather than incidental: officers who fail to respond on time, insufficient police visibility, and perceptions of widespread corruption and incompetence.

This erosion of trust does not occur in a vacuum. It creates a marketing opportunity. Private security enterprises do not grow in spite of policing failures — they grow because of them, leveraging fear, institutional distrust, and the visible decline of policing competency as the engine of commercial expansion. The failure of the state is, quite literally, the business model of the private sector.

Signal Three: Norm drift and the collapse of institutional culture

Perhaps the most alarming signal is what criminologists’ term “norm drift” — the gradual erosion of professional and ethical standards within an institution, made visible through conduct rather than proclamation.

In SAPS, this drift is statistically measurable. Over 27 years of unstable and frequently corrupt leadership, the organisation has accumulated more than R100 billion in outstanding and new civil claims. Nearly 75% of settled claims arose from unlawful arrest and detention — conduct that represents not merely individual misconduct, but a systemic disregard for the constitutional rights of citizens.

The national average of civil claims against SAPS stands at 7 per 100 employees. In the North West Province, that figure rises to 30 claims per 100 employees. These are not outliers. They are indicators of a sub-culture in crisis — an institution in which the norms of constitutional policing have been so thoroughly eroded that unlawful conduct has, in parts of the organisation, become operationally normalised.

When an institution loses its internal moral compass at this scale, it does not merely fail its citizens. It fails itself.

Signal Four: Disciplinary decay

The volume of disciplinary cases initiated against SAPS officials reinforces the picture of an organisation struggling to enforce its own standards from within. The national average stands at approximately 3 disciplinary cases per 100 employees — translating to roughly 4,000 cases per annum across the organisation.

An institution that generates 4,000 internal disciplinary matters each year is not experiencing a discipline problem. It is experiencing a culture problem. Discipline is the mechanism by which culture is enforced. When that mechanism is overwhelmed, it signals that the underlying values it is meant to protect have already been compromised.

Signal Five: The military contradiction

The continued and expanding deployment of South African National Defence Force (SANDF) units alongside SAPS is not merely an operational challenge — it is a constitutional and doctrinal contradiction that is rarely examined with the seriousness it deserves.

The SAPS operates under lex generalis — the general body of civilian law, including the Constitution, with its attendant protections of human rights, due process, and the rule of law. The SANDF operates under lex specialis — a distinct legal regime designed for the prosecution of armed conflict, in which the primary objective is to neutralise threats with overwhelming force and minimal procedural constraint.

These are not compatible frameworks. The SANDF is trained to defend the country from external invasion and to eliminate enemy combatants — a mission in which the neutralisation of threats takes precedence over legal processing or rehabilitation. The SAPS, by contrast, is trained to protect, serve, and uphold the values of a constitutional democracy — a mission that demands restraint, proportionality, and respect for individual rights even under operational stress. The philosophical aim of their respective training regimes is, at its core, nearly opposite.

Deploying these two institutions side by side in domestic civilian environments — without clear legal delineation of authority and accountability — is not a force-multiplication strategy. It is an operational and constitutional risk that South Africa has thus far been fortunate not to have tested to catastrophic consequence.

What 30 June is about to reveal

The deployment planned for 30 June 2026 is not an emergency arrangement born of unforeseen crisis. It is the visible culmination of a process that has been underway for thirty years.

When the state is compelled to solicit assistance from a private commercial entity — furnishing helicopters, vehicles, personnel, and intelligence — to execute a core constitutional function, the logical conclusion is unavoidable: SAPS cannot independently execute its constitutional mandate.

That conclusion carries profound implications. Section 205(3) of the Constitution is unambiguous: the objects of the police service are to prevent, combat and investigate crime; to maintain public order; to protect and secure the inhabitants of the Republic and their property; and to uphold and enforce the law. These are not aspirational goals. They are constitutional obligations. On 30 June 2026, they will be partially discharged by a private company whose accountability runs to its board — not to Parliament, not to the public, and not to the Constitution.

This is the abdication made visible. And it will happen in broad daylight, announced in advance, without apparent institutional embarrassment.

The uncomfortable questions South Africa must now ask

This analysis is not offered as a counsel of despair, nor as a case against all public-private cooperation in security governance. Structured, legally governed, democratically accountable cooperation between SAPS and the private sector is not inherently problematic.

What is problematic is cooperation that substitutes for capacity rather than supplementing it; that normalises state weakness rather than confronting it; and that entrenches a two-tier system in which constitutional rights are distributed, in practice, according to income.

South Africa deserves an honest national reckoning with the following:

• At what point does a “force multiplier” become a “substitute force”? And who, precisely, holds authority when that line is crossed?
• If SAPS cannot execute its mandate without private sector support for a planned, anticipated, publicly announced event — what happens when the crisis is unplanned?
• What legal mechanisms exist to hold private security companies accountable when they are, in effect, performing policing functions in the public domain?
• How does a constitutional democracy restore the right to safety to all its citizens — not merely those with paying accounts?

The gradual, then sudden truth

Ernest Hemingway once described bankruptcy as happening “gradually, then suddenly.” The same is true of institutional abdication, I would argue.

South Africa has not lost its policing capacity overnight. It has ceded it across three decades of leadership instability, the exodus of capable police officers, resource misallocation, cultural erosion, and the quiet, commercially convenient growth of an industry that profits precisely from the gap the state left behind.

The 30th of June will offer a unique and unambiguous window into that reality. The question is whether South Africans — and their elected representatives — will look through it clearly or look away.

The debate about whether SAPS has partially abdicated its constitutional mandate is, in the author’s view, already settled by the evidence. The debate that remains — urgent, necessary, and deeply uncomfortable — is what South Africa chooses to do about it.

Cobus Steenkamp