Wave of Mass Shootings and Systemic Failure of Public Safety

GOOD Statement by Jonathan Cupido, GOOD City of Cape Town Councillor:

The GOOD Party condemns, in the strongest and most unambiguous terms, the ongoing bloodbath unfolding across the City of Cape Town.

In just over a week, our city has been rocked by four mass shootings in Marikana, New Crossroads, Hillview, and Maitland, leaving scores of people dead or wounded, families shattered, and communities terrorised in their own homes.

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, six people were murdered in two separate shooting incidents in Maitland and Ndabeni. In an unrelated attack, two more men were killed and two others wounded at the Maitland cemetery. Days earlier in Crossroads, four people were shot on David Street, where a mother and another victim later died of their injuries.

Most tragically, we also mourn the murder of a 48-year-old SAPS officer in Browns Farm, who was shot dead while off duty. The GOOD Party extends its deepest condolences to his family, his colleagues, and all families who have lost loved ones in these brutal acts of violence. An attack on a police officer is an attack on the entire public safety system, and it confirms just how far lawlessness has metastasised in this country.

Let us be brutally honest:

This is no longer a crime spike. This is a governance collapse. These killings are not random. They are not isolated. They are not unforeseeable. They are the predictable outcome of a broken system that waits for bodies before it acts.

For months, communities have been reporting ongoing gunfire, extortion threats, intimidation shootings, and escalating gang violence. None of this meaningfully registers in official crime statistics. None of it triggers early intervention. None of it shifts resources. We govern blindly, and then we act surprised when mass shootings happen.

We are not failing because we lack laws. We are failing because we refuse to fix the policy breaks, data failures, and budget priorities that keep reproducing this violence.

Calls for a state of emergency are understandable. People are desperate. People are afraid. However, let us be clear: bringing in the SANDF will not resolve this crisis. It will pause it.

It will contain it. It will cosmetically suppress it.

Soldiers cannot undo trauma. Soldiers cannot break gang recruitment. Soldiers cannot fix broken schools, broken families, broken data systems, or broken social services.

A real state of emergency is not boots on the streets. A real state of emergency is the government finally acting as lives matter more than line items.

If a state of emergency is declared, it must mean:

• Immediate budget shifts into violence prevention, trauma care, youth diversion, and mental-health services.
• Emergency policy amendments and new frameworks to treat violence as a public-health and social crisis, not only a policing problem.
• Mandatory recording of unlawful firearm discharge as a serious crime category.
• A coordinated violence-prevention unit that intervenes before funerals, not after.
• Rapid deployment of gang-exit programmes, school-based interventions, and employment pathways in hotspot communities.

Anything less is political theatre.

This country will never arrest its way out of generational trauma and organised violence. It will never police its way out of poverty, exclusion, and broken social systems. And it will never tech its way out of a crisis that is fundamentally human.

All three spheres of government must now stop passing the buck and start doing the work:

• National government must fix SAPS leadership failures, intelligence gaps, and broken crime data systems.
• Provincial government must fund and drive a real violence-prevention strategy, not just task teams.
• Local government must stop hiding behind jurisdiction and start investing in community safety, trauma response, youth support, and prevention infrastructure.

This is not a failure of policing alone. This is a policy failure. A budget failure and frankly, a leadership failure. We cannot keep normalising gunfire. We cannot keep counting bodies. And we certainly cannot keep governing as if this level of bloodshed is inevitable.

The GOOD Party calls for an urgent, prevention-first reset of public safety policy across all spheres of government. We believe it’s time to act as the government and stop with the condolences that could have been prevented, we must stop with the photo-ops, and empty slogans about being “tough on crime”.

This must stop, and it must not stop next year and not after the next massacre. It must be addressed now.

Crime is not experienced as a spreadsheet.

It is experienced as gunfire outside your home.

GOOD Anti-Discrimination: GOOD stands against all forms of discrimination and promotes equality.

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