Durban - The SAPS have amended their bungled annual crime statistics for KwaZulu-Natal - five days after they were initially released - and they now show, in some cases, massive spikes in certain crimes.
However, the accuracy of the updated data is still in doubt, because while some KZN police stations now reflect crime spikes higher than 1 000 incidents, from 20 in the original statistics, the overall provincial totals for 2013/14 remain the same.
Moreover, it appears that the statistics for the previous year, 2012/13, was also changed.
The updated 2013/14 statistics were released on Heritage Day, but the police top brass remain tight-lipped as to the cause of the debacle, which was brought to their attention by the Daily News and the Institute for Security Studies.
Community police forums in KZN that had rejected the original stats had also vowed to take up the matter.
The original crime stats showed on Friday that some KZN police stations had a 100 percent drop in crime and other areas - not known for crime - had spikes of up to 6 000 percent.
The Daily News has again sifted through the hundreds of pages of statistics posted by the SAPS on Wednesday for various suburbs and picked up huge increases in certain crimes.
For example, robbery with aggravating circumstances in Pinetown has shot up from 20 to a staggering 1 035 incidents recorded for a one-year period in 2013/14.
In Pietermaritzburg shoplifting has spiked from one incident to 678.
Westville police station, which covers a residential area and has three major shopping centres in its patrol area, including the Pavilion, initially had 192 cases of stock theft and one incident of shoplifting. But stock theft is now reflected as being nil and the number of shoplifting incidents has since changed to 550.
And robbery (aggravating) for Westville is no longer 41 cases but 224 (in 2012/13 it was 219), house robberies (occupants are robbed at home) has increased from 21 in last week’s stats to 105, burglaries from 150 to 551 and theft of, or from, motor vehicle, from four to 109.
Westville Community Police Forum (CPF) chairman Mike Myers said he could not comment until he had had sufficient time to analyse the updated statistics with the station management.
Umzinto crime, according to the statistics released on Friday, decreased by 100 percent - with no burglaries, carjackings, house robberies or business robberies reported.
The new data shows there were 268 burglaries, five carjackings, 21 house robberies and 11 business robberies.
Nottingham Road police station, located in the Midlands, a popular destination for local and international tourists, showed that 12 cases of robbery with aggravating circumstances were reported as opposed to 439 last week.
Police refused to reveal what went wrong or how the final figures were signed off, and by whom.
The Institute for Security Studies (ISS), however, claims that the wrong figures were a result of police statisticians “copying and pasting the wrong data” into an Excel spreadsheet. This resulted in incorrect figures for KZN and Limpopo.
Provincial police spokes-man, Captain Thulani Zwane, said the KZN police commissioner would be holding an official press briefing on the crime statistics “soon”.
In a letter to the national and provincial police commissioners and the Sydenham station commander, the Sydenham CPF chairman, Mansoor Akoo, suggested that if they were to seriously combat crime in partnership with SAPS then detailed statistics must be released to CPFs daily or weekly so they could implement community awareness and anti-crime campaigns.
Akoo highlighted the fact that the station had charged more than the six motorists initially recorded as having been arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol during 2013/14.
The corrected version showed 334 arrests, 30 more than the previous year.
The updated statistics for Sydenham showed 77 house robberies, not seven; and put carjackings at 108, up from 87.
Montclair sex crime figures - given as 36 for 2012/13 and 383 for 2013/14 - were corrected down to 42; and theft of, or from, motor vehicles, went from 928 to 239.
In Mid-Illovo, sex crimes increased from 10 in the previous period to 12 in the current period (and not 244 as initially released). Residential burglaries have been corrected to 20 from 1 149 a week ago.
Earlier this week, DA MP Dianne Kohler Barnard alleged that Police Minister Nathi Nhleko could have lied when he stated that the recently released stats had been audited.
But the A-G’s spokesman, Africa Boso, said they were audited only “on a sample basis”.
“Although the national crime statistics per se were not audited, the case administration system, which produced the crime stats, was subjected to an audit and the information was found to be credible,” Boso said.
Kohler Barnard said she would write to Nhleko requesting he immediately table the 2013/14 crime statistics before Parliament so that the portfolio committee on police can assess the validity of the crime stats, “and whether or not they have indeed been audited by the office of the auditor general”.
“This follows my engagements with the A-G’s office on Wednesday who informed me that they have not yet audited these latest crime stats as Minister Nhleko and national police commissioner Riah Phiyega claimed last Friday,” she said.
Daily News and Sapa