Johannesburg - South Africans are becoming less safe, even as overall crime rates continue to decline, the latest crime statistics show. Serious crimes reported to the police - as opposed to those they discover themselves through police work - have dropped consistently over the past 10 years, from a total of 1.948 million for the 2006-07 period to 1.771 million for the 2015-16 period.
But within this, contact crimes - which include murder, rape and assault - have risen for the third straight year in a row, while other crimes have declined such as sex offences and rape.
The so-called trio crimes - car-hijacking, robbery at residential premises and robbery at non-residential premises - which form a sub-category of contact crimes, all increased, although the rate of increase slowed.
Car-hijacking was up 14.3 percent, robbery at residential premises 2.7 percent and robbery at non-residential premises 2.8 percent.
Contact crimes have reduced from 724 393 in 2006-07 to 623 223 in the past year, but have been on the rise since 2012-13.
Murder is up 4.9 percent this year, following increases of 4.6 percent and 5 percent in the preceding two years, while attempted murder has shown a similar increase, rising 3.4 percent this year after edging up 3.2 percent and 4.6 percent in the previous two years.
“The most important message to take away from the 2015-16 crime statistics is that unfortunately public safety is deteriorating in South Africa,” said Gareth Newham, head of the Institute for Security Studies’ governance, crime and justice division.
The murder rate had increased about 20 percent in over the past four years, Newham said, resulting in the violent deaths of at least 19 000 people in the past year, compared with 15 500 four years ago.
Similarly, armed robberies, which Newham said were committed by small groups of armed individuals who targeted people in the streets, their homes and places of work, or who hijacked cars, had increased.
According to the statistics presented by police management in Parliament on Friday, robbery with aggravating circumstances rose 2.7 percent this year, after recording alarming jumps of 8.5 percent and 12.8 percent in the preceding two years.
“This kind of crime causes a lot of fear and makes people feel particularly vulnerable because they’re attacked in places where they usually should feel safe,” Newham said.
He said crime interventions should be focused on these two categories of crime and the factors that drove them. However, murder and most kinds of violent crime were driven by a variety of complex factors, including socio-economic circumstances and location, and there was little the police could do to reduce them.
“Therefore, we need to start thinking about how we make sure we’re safer 10 years from now, rather than thinking the police are going to get on top of this on their own,” Newham said.
“We need to be investing in programmes that reduce the extent of child abuse and trauma in our society if we’re going to have young people growing up into healthy productive adults who are not affected by violence in their communities and themselves becoming violent.”
But in the case of armed robberies, Newham said the police could make a difference because they were committed by a small group of repeat offenders and supplied people trading in stolen goods.
Effective use of crime intelligence to identify the networks and individuals involved, particularly those involved in organised crime, such as car-jacking, proper forensic support and well-trained and motivated detectives would help the police get on top of this crime, Newham said.
“So we really need to see very clear strategies for preventing crime, preventing violence, and, in the short term, dealing with people committing armed robberies. If those two components focus our attention for the next few years we should see sustainable improvements in safety in South Africa.”
Police Minister Nathi Nhleko said in areas where the SAPS could do conventional policing there was progress in bringing down crime, but where this was not the case, such as with contact crimes, which were often committed by people known to the victim behind closed doors, it was difficult for the police to make a difference.
These crimes related to “patterns of social behaviour”, he said, citing high levels of domestic violence and vigilantism as examples.
Francois Beukman, the chairman of Parliament’s police oversight committee, said the raw figures of crimes recorded should be weighed against the increase in the population since 2006.
However, he emphasised the role of communities in helping the police bring down the figures, saying the processing of the White Paper on policing, which envisages deeper involvement of community policing forums, would be vital to success.
DA spokesman on police Zakhele Mbhele said his party was alarmed by the significant increases in crimes that South Africans feared most.
“Crimes such as sexual assault, murder, attempted murder, aggravated robbery and hijacking are the crimes that keep South Africans in constant fear and awake at night. These are the crimes nightmares are made of,” Mbhele said.
The SAPS was chronically under-resourced, under-trained, under-equipped and under-staffed.
“This impacts directly on the SAPS’s ability to make meaningful inroads in reducing crime,” he said.
The Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (Popcru) said the statistics reflected more of a social problem than a police problem.
“A greater portion of the prison population in our country is increasingly youth, therefore reflecting the many social frustrations like unemployment, drug and substance abuse, all of which have been identified as part of the causal factors for aggressive crimes such as armed robbery, house break-ins, theft and murder,” Popcru spokesman Richard Mamabolo said.
Saturday Star