The DA has announced plans to establish its own detective unit to investigate crime in the city.

The party’s election campaign took the form of an anti-crime march in Delft on Wednesday, in which the party’s local leadership, including DA Federal Leader and city Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, the City’s Safety and Security Chief JP Smith and Western Cape Premier Alan Winde, took part.

Hill-Lewis then took the opportunity to pledge to establish the country’s first metro police detective department in Cape Town, but only after the 4 November local government elections.

“After the fourth of November, with your support, we will not only be on the streets making the arrests, we will investigate that case, and we will have a case file that is complete, that’s got all the evidence to make sure that that criminal goes behind bars,” said Hill-Lewis.

The DA also adopted the slogan “Catch, Convict, Clean Up” as part of its campaign to tackle crime in Cape Town.

“It’s not good enough to just catch, we catching criminals everyday, only for the courts to let them out the next day again. We have to get the second part right, and that is convict. And we have to get the third part right, which is clean up the corrupt cops out of the SAPS,” added Hill-Lewis.

The DA-run City of Cape Town has long called for the devolution of policing powers. There have, however, been multiple delays for the City in that regard, and Smith said he thinks “it’s an idea whose time has come”.

“We’ve never awaited for national government, or anybody else to fix our problems; we fix our own problems as far as we can, and within our means, we’ve really done everything that local government can do, punching well above our weight range,” said Smith.