Cape Town’s long-running gang violence crisis is increasingly being viewed as a wider criminal ecosystem involving territory, drugs, illegal firearms, extortion and money laundering, with experts warning that children are being recruited into gangs at increasingly young ages.
For families affected by the violence, the consequences extend far beyond individual shootings.
Louis Solomon, a mother from Atlantis, said speaking publicly about the death of her son felt like reliving the trauma. She said her son had struggled with drug use but had begun changing his life before he was brutally killed.
Solomon said communities needed greater protection and justice.
“We plead for justice, we plead for protection, and for partnership in fighting against gangsterism,” she said, describing the violence as a daily scourge hanging over residents.
The concerns come as lawmakers and organised-crime specialists warn that conventional policing alone has failed to dismantle the networks responsible for gang-related crime.
Turf, drugs and guns drive the gang economy
Mark Shaw, executive director of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime, said gangs were increasingly recruiting children as young as seven or eight.
He described Cape Town’s gang environment as an ecosystem built around three central elements: control of territory, the drug market and firearms.
Territory allows gangs to establish control over specific areas and communities. Drugs remain a major source of income, while guns provide the means to enforce control and protect criminal markets.
Extortion has also become an important component of the gang economy, Shaw said.
He said the Western Cape had about 110 gangs according to the organisation’s assessment.
While official police figures have indicated a gradual reduction in overall violence in the Western Cape, Shaw said gang-related violence had increased between 2020 and 2025.
The financial incentives behind organised crime were a major factor, he said, with gang leaders becoming increasingly sophisticated in laundering criminal proceeds.
Shaw warned that the economic benefits generated by gangs meant that violence could continue even when communities suffered devastating losses.
Ian Cameron, chairperson of Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Police, said the scale of gang violence in the Cape Flats had become increasingly serious.
He warned that daily killings could continue to rise without effective intervention.
Cameron also identified the proliferation of illegal firearms as a major driver of gang-related violence and said capacity and skills constraints within the South African Police Service continued to hamper efforts to tackle the problem.
Experts call for an intelligence-led response
Cameron said the police committee remained concerned that the SAPS response had not been sufficient.
He argued that policing strategies had often followed broad crime trends instead of focusing specifically on intelligence-led efforts to identify, disrupt and dismantle gang networks.
Effective intelligence, stronger cooperation with communities and coordination between law-enforcement agencies would be necessary to make meaningful progress, he said.
Llewellyn Macmaster of the Cape Crime Crisis Coalition argued that authorities needed to look beyond gangs as individual organisations and instead target the wider ecosystem that allows them to operate.
He said enforcement alone could not resolve the crisis.
Macmaster argued that all three levels of government had powers and constitutional responsibilities that could be used to weaken the environment in which gangs operate.
He also described the continuing violence as more than a policy failure, arguing that repeated killings, child recruitment and the intimidation of communities raised broader questions about the state’s responsibility to protect citizens.
Gangs tend to flourish where state institutions are absent, weakened or compromised, he said.
Macpherson has recommended expanding the terms of reference of the Madlanga Commission to include gang violence.
Cameron said the scale of the problem required an all-of-government and whole-of-society response involving the SAPS, municipal law enforcement, prosecutors, forensic services, intelligence structures, communities and other government institutions.
The Portfolio Committee on Police plans to finalise its findings and recommendations and submit them to the National Assembly before the end of the current financial year.