Four Dead in Bishop Lavis

GOOD Statement by Brett Herron, GOOD Secretary-General:

The Cape Flats was rocked by yet another mass murder on Friday night. Four adults were gunned down inside a home in Bishop Lavis. By Saturday morning, life had moved on. No heightened police presence. No wall-to-wall media coverage. No outrage. In the Cape Flats, violence has become so normalised that mass murder is met with a collective shrug from government and society alike.

Just last week, two teenage boys were shot and killed in Mitchells Plain. Before that, it was a mass shooting in Gugulethu. Then Philippi. Then Khayelitsha. Week after week, the same story. These murders are not isolated incidents. They are symptoms of a city that continues to entrench spatial and economic injustice.

According to the Q4 crime statistics (Jan – March 2025), Cape Town accounted for 81.2% of the Western Cape’s 1,068 murders. Alarmingly, 477 of those killings were reported at just 10 police stations: Delft, Mfuleni, Nyanga, Philippi East, Kraaifontein, Gugulethu, Khayelitsha, Harare, Samora Machel, and Lwandle. The statistics speak for themselves. Violence is flourishing in communities where opportunities are few, hope is fragile, and the City’s leadership is absent.

The City of Cape Town and the Western Cape Government claim to take safety seriously, yet they continue to pour billions into a failed Safety Plan, while doing little to address the root causes of violence.  The Safety Plan is a crude boots-on-the-ground force multiplier strategy, in the form of LEAP officers, and this massive investment in policing is having no objective impact. While the quality of our policing, and SAPS policing strategies, must be improved, policing alone will not eradicate the crime and gang violence that the people of the Cape Flats have lived with for far too long and which is evidently escalating.

The truth is that the living conditions in the apartheid era ghettos, which are almost exclusively the locations of this violence, have remained ghetto-like.  In fact, these ghetto-like conditions have mostly worsened over the past 30 years as the state has failed to effectively implement a spatial transformation programme that integrates our city but also redresses the underinvestment in the apartheid-era ghettos.

And now to compound this, the City is entrenching spatial injustice through a new planning policy, an amendment to the Municipal Planning By-law, that doubles down on apartheid-era spatial design.

Until the City and Province confront the realities of spatial injustice, economic exclusion, and community abandonment, the killings will continue and the silence that follows them will echo even louder. Because four people should not be murdered on a Friday night and forgotten by Saturday morning.

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