Criminal Justice System Faces Collapse; Trust Plummets to 4 Percent in South Africa

South Africa’s criminal justice system scores four out of 100 in public trust. That number, drawn from Action Society’s Criminal Justice Trust Indicator baseline survey conducted in February 2026, is not a rounding error. It is a verdict on a system that consistently fails to convert investigation into consequence.

The survey of 2,057 respondents produced findings that are difficult to dismiss. Nearly 96.4% of respondents said there is no justice for crime in South Africa. Just over 90% reported they had not personally received justice for a criminal offence in the past 20 years. When asked where delays occur, 85.4% identified SAPS and the courts as the source. These are not abstract grievances. They describe a delivery failure at every stage of the criminal justice pipeline.

The core problem is structural. Criminological research established decades ago that the strongest deterrent to crime is not harsher sentences or visible police presence alone, but the certainty of consequence. Offenders are deterred when they believe they will be caught, prosecuted and face real punishment. When that certainty collapses, so does the expected cost of committing crime. South Africa’s system has lost that certainty, and the gap between investigation and prosecution is where it disappears.

Devolved policing has gained serious traction, particularly in the Western Cape, where local governments already deploy law-enforcement resources, gather intelligence and respond to crime patterns closer to the ground than national institutions can manage. But devolved investigation without decentralised prosecution creates a structural trap. A well-prepared docket still needs a prosecutor. A lawful arrest still requires an enrollment decision. If investigative capacity moves to provinces while prosecution remains trapped in a centralised bottleneck, the certainty of consequence does not improve. Devolved policing without decentralised prosecution is like building a road that stops at the courthouse door.

The National Prosecuting Authority contains many committed prosecutors working daily in courts across the country. The problem is not individual officials. It is institutional design. A single national prosecuting authority operating in a system overwhelmed by volume, backlog, withdrawals and coordination failures cannot be the only pathway through which every community seeks consequence. Section 179 of the Constitution created one national prosecuting authority, a design that may have served uniformity when adopted but no longer delivers justice at scale.

What changed is not the commitment of prosecutors. What changed is the volume, the complexity and the expectation that a centralised institution can serve every community equally well from a distance.

Constitutional reform should permit provincial prosecutorial powers linked to devolved investigative powers, operating under strict national standards. Provincial prosecution services should be permitted only where clear objective criteria are met: prosecutors must act without fear, favour or prejudice, national norms must apply, and the National Director of Public Prosecutions should retain oversight powers in matters of national importance, organised crime spanning provinces or cases involving clear conflicts of interest. The default assumption must change. Central authority should no longer be permitted to fail while preventing capable provinces from succeeding locally.

Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption offers a useful reference point. Rather than treating corruption as a policing problem only, the ICAC combined investigation, prevention and public education. It does not itself prosecute but forwards evidence to Hong Kong’s Department of Justice, whose Prosecutions Division advises investigators and exercises prosecutorial discretion. That tight linkage between specialised investigation and capable, independent prosecution is precisely what South Africa lacks.

A provincial prosecution model would also bring accountability closer to the people most affected by crime. Today, victims often have no meaningful way to know why their case is delayed, withdrawn or ignored. Decentralised prosecution would make the system answerable to the communities it serves, rather than to distant central authorities.

Years ago, devolved policing sounded far-fetched. Today it is part of serious public debate. The same momentum must extend to prosecution. Victims have heard promises that the NPA must do better for years. They need a system redesigned around certainty of consequence. When the criminal justice system scores four out of 100, the status quo has lost the right to be treated as sacred.

The case for decentralised prosecutions is detailed in analysis available at https://mg.co.za/thought-leader/2026-07-12-south-africa-needs-decentralised-prosecutions-and-policing/ and reflects growing recognition that institutional redesign is the only path forward. The open question now is whether the political will to extend reform from policing to prosecution will arrive before another generation of victims stops expecting it.