The Democratic Alliance (DA) held a mass protest in Cape Town on Thursday against what it calls Minister of Police Bheki Cele's "plan to hijack local law enforcement".

At the protest - which took place in Mitchells Plain - the protesters handed a memorandum to the Lentegeur police station which rejected "the ongoing efforts by Cele and the African National Congress (ANC) to capture Cape Town's local law enforcement powers".

The memorandum gave Cele and the national government seven days to scrap plans for a centralised policing command structure.

According to DA Cape Town mayoral candidate Geordin Hill-Lewis, this plan would see the Cape Town Metro Police Department absorbed into the national police service and would take away the municipality's "power to set its own local policing priorities".

The Single Police Service plan would also limit the powers of peace officers and move the command-and-control structure away from the municipality and into the national police service, said Hill-Lewis.

"This scheme will have disastrous consequences for Capetonians, who will lose the ability to have a second option to call on to solve their problems and will make them subject to decisions made 1 500km away in Pretoria," said Hill-Lewis.

No legislative power

The policy would impact the R1.7-billion Law Enforcement Advancement Plan (LEAP), said Hill-Lewis.

In response to the memorandum, police ministry spokesperson Lirandzu Themba referred News24 to Cele's recent address at the National Council of Provinces (NCOP).

"The ministry's position on the matter is reflected in the debate at NCOP which was called by the DA. This position still stands," she said.

During the debate, Cele said criminal syndicates were recruiting and committing crimes across provincial borders. He added that the national government's plan would improve the central command and control of policing.

"Central Command is about combining resources across government and working in tandem, to enable police to chase crime in all corners of the country. Working in silos is simply not an option, if we are indeed serious about effective and efficient policing,” he said.

Cele added that there was no legislative power enabling provinces to take on a national competency such as policing. 

"The country is policed in a uniform manner and all South Africans are entitled to policing of an equal standard," he said.

"It is on this score that I submit that the 'taking over' of policing by provinces will be detrimental to policing as a whole and will diminish the role and responsibility of the National Commissioner, who, is in law, responsible to command and control the policing across the country."

The memorandum also demanded national government scrap the District Development Model (DMM).

This would "complete the hijacking of local policing powers" by removing the municipality's ability to set their own policing priorities and provide funding to their own law enforcement agencies, instead centralising the country's policing budget; and would also allow the national government "the power to unconstitutionally interfere with the functions of municipalities", said Hill-Lewis.