South Africa has had sufficient ritual lament about its police service (SAPS). The Madlanga, Khampepe and Marikana commissions, the Khayelitsha inquiry ... the list of performative accountability regarding policing is endless.
South Africa needs actual reform of policing. Two of the most instructive international examples of how to fix a broken policing system are Hong Kong and Northern Ireland. They were very different places with very different policing crises. Yet both showed that recovery begins when a state stops performing accountability and actually starts doing accountability.
Hong Kong
Hong Kong’s crisis in the 1960s and early 70s was, above all, a crisis of corruption. The rot in the Hong Kong police force was deeply systemic. Corruption was rampant across the entire public sector, and particularly serious in the police (sound familiar?). Corrupt police protected vice, gambling and drug activities, and law and order itself was under threat.
The reform response was direct and blunt. In 1974 Hong Kong created the Independent Commission Against Corruption, completely separate from the police, and built its work around three pillars of enforcement, prevention and community education.
The clear lesson for South Africa is that when corruption is deeply embedded in policing, internal disciplinary systems are not enough. A compromised institution cannot credibly police itself. Hong Kong’s answer was not to ask the police to kindly become less corrupt.
Hong Kong’s answer was not to ask the police to kindly become less corrupt. It created an external body with the authority, independence and public standing to investigate corruption outside the police chain of command.
It created an external body with the authority, independence and public standing to investigate corruption outside the police chain of command. Just as important, it did not rely on arrests alone. It paired enforcement with systems reform and with a deliberate campaign to change public expectations about corruption.
That is the first lesson for South Africa. Anti-corruption in policing cannot be a side project and it cannot be left to the SAPS to fix the SAPS. It must be institutionalised outside the ordinary command structure. South Africans already know what happens when oversight bodies are weak, politically vulnerable or dependent on the very machinery they are supposed to scrutinise. The Hong Kong lesson is that integrity reform succeeds when it is visible, independent and relentless.
Northern Ireland
By contrast, Northern Ireland was not chiefly a story of bribery and organised corruption. It was a story of legitimacy in a divided society. The Patten Commission’s 1999 report began from the premise that policing could not be effective if it lacked support from the community as a whole.
It also stated, in one of its most important formulations, that the fundamental purpose of policing should be “the protection and vindication of the human rights of all”. That laid the foundation for rebuilding a police service in a society where the police had long been seen by many not as neutral upholders of the law.
The Patten reforms understood that the legitimacy of a police force is structural. It is not created by advertising campaigns or community imbizos alone. So Northern Ireland built new institutions around the police. The report recommended an entirely new policing board to hold the chief constable and the police service publicly to account.
It strongly backed a fully independent police ombudsman with its own investigators. It also insisted that the police service be representative of the society it polices. At the time only about 8% of officers were Catholic in a population where more than 40% identified as Catholic. Today, Police Service of Northern Ireland workforce statistics record that about 32% of police officers are Catholic.
But another important part of the Northern Irish lesson is that policing was also brought closer to the people it serves. Over time policing and justice became devolved matters in Northern Ireland rather than remaining the preserve of a distant central authority alone. That mattered not merely as a constitutional technicality, but as part of making policing more accountable, more locally rooted, and more personal.
In a society marked by deep mistrust, legitimacy is strengthened when communities can see that policing is not simply imposed from afar but is shaped through institutions that are closer to them, more responsive to them and more visibly answerable to them. In that sense, devolution was part of the solution: it helped embed the principle that policing must be grounded in the consent and confidence of the people among whom it operates.
Those reforms did not produce perfection, and Northern Ireland still has difficult policing debates. But they did change the institutional terrain considerably. Parliamentary evidence submitted in 2025 shows that perceptions of equal treatment improved substantially over time: in 2001 55% of Catholics and 71% of Protestants thought police treated both communities equally; by 2023/24 those figures had risen to 73% and 88%, respectively.
The second lesson for South Africa from Northern Ireland is that where policing is shaped by deep social mistrust, reform must be constitutional in character. After decades of failure many citizens experience the state either as absent or predatory, and in many cases believe the police are part of the very criminal networks they ought to be dismantling.
New institutions, harder accountability
That is a legitimacy crisis. And legitimacy cannot be restored unless accountability is credible, complaints are independently investigated, and the police visibly serve the public rather than factions within the state. It also cannot be restored if policing remains too distant, too centralised and too insulated from the communities most affected by crime. One of Northern Ireland’s clearest lessons is that bringing policing closer to the people it serves can itself form part of institutional renewal.
The deeper lesson, though, is one of political seriousness. Hong Kong’s reformers grasped that corruption had to be broken institutionally. Northern Ireland’s reformers grasped that mistrust had to be addressed constitutionally. Both cases rejected the fantasy that a broken police service can simply be managed a little better.
South Africa will have to make the same choice. Either we continue to improvise around decline, or we accept that police reform requires new institutions, harder accountability and a moral refounding of the service itself.
Luckily the real question is not whether the SAPS can be turned around. International experience suggests it can. The real question is whether South Africa has the political courage to do what serious reform actually demands.
• Du Preez is national spokesperson for Action Society.
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