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Nor is Mchunu wasting his energy, as Cele used to, trying to polish turds. The quarterly release of crime statistics was always a public ordeal for Cele as he tried to put a positive spin on a remorseless downward march in the numbers, trying to convince South Africans that the police were winning the battle.
Against the cumulative weight of all the evidence, Cele would seize on a tiny improvement in one category, on a fractional pause in the negative trend in another, to reassure us that we shouldn’t be as fearful of crime as every social survey indicates we are. The incidence of murder — an ideal statistical proxy for all criminal violence because it is the most reliably recorded — would be buried, metaphorically speaking, among some carefully selected and buffed nuggets of “good news”.
Last week, presenting the crime statistics for the first quarter of the government’s 2024/25 financial year, Senzo Mchunu took a different tack. Instead of waxing lyrical, as Cele would have done, on the fact that there were only 30 more murders in the period April-June than in the same period the previous year, while ignoring the fact that it’s against a steadily increasing trend over the past dozen years — Mchunu was at least honest.
“Contact crimes, in particular, are wreaking havoc and instilling fear, he said. The numbers told a “sobering story” and were a “stark reminder” that urgent action was needed to deal with what he described as a crisis.
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The latest figures unsurprisingly show that the crimes that Minister says “should worry us most” — murder, rape, hijacking, kidnapping for ransom payments, and extortion — are generally on the increase. Contact crimes, ie crimes against the person, were up 2.6% measured against the first quarter of last year.
Revealingly the April-June first-quarter figures of 2024/25 were accompanied by the delayed release of those of January-March, the last quarter of 2023/24. It would seem that the African National Congress government deviously hung on to the last-quarter’s figures until after the 29 May election, for fear of the ammunition it would have given the opposition parties.
One can understand, if not forgive, the government’s delaying tactics. The numbers are grim.
Compared to the same period last year, in January-March 2024 there were 247 more murders (+3.9%), to a total of 6,536. It all adds up: that’s 1,947 more murders (+42%) than in the corresponding period four years ago. April-June 2024 was insignificantly 0.5% down on the corresponding quarter last year, to total 6,198.
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So far, in the three months of the 2024 calendar year, contact crimes are up 4.6%, with sex crimes specifically up 4.3%. Truck hijacking, however, was up 5.3% with 458 reported incidents, an increase of 61% since 2020.
The only positives were in what SAPS calls the “trio crimes”: car hijacking, robbery at residential premises, and robbery at non-residential premises. They were only marginally up by 0.2% in January to March, to drop 2.7% in April-June.
In their entirety, however, the statistics for the past six months are another indictment of Cele, and also of Ramaphosa, who backed his bellicose and incompetent Police minister through thick and thin despite massive criticism of Cele’s performance. Were it not for the fact that he failed to be re-elected as an MP in May because of the 18% drop in support for the ANC, it’s perfectly likely that Cele would still be in the job.
These SAPS statistics, damning as they are, are only part of the picture.
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The police figures are based on officially opened case dockets. And as almost anybody who has tried to report a crime will attest, SAPS charge office staff do everything in their power to discourage the registration of a criminal complaint. After all, the more crimes recorded, the worse the government’s law and order figures and the worse the SAPS solved cases figures.
Low detection rates — only 13% of murders, the most conscientiously investigated crime category, are solved — exacerbate the public’s reluctance to go to the cops unless they need a case number for insurance purposes. So, too, does the awareness, especially in many poor areas, that corrupt police officers are either directly involved in committing the crimes or in protecting the perpetrators.
Arguably at least as important in gauging the true cost of crime are the regular Victims of Crime (VoC) surveys carried out by StatsSA. These, based as they are on the experience at a household and individual level of the sharp end of lawlessness, capture a broader, more accurate and even more alarming picture than does the SAPS.
The most recent VoC survey, released last week, indicates that the serious crime problem is far worse than is officially acknowledged. According to these figures, sexual offences against individuals increased by 73.3% in 2023/24 compared to the previous year and assaults increased by 12%.
In 2023/24 about 6% of families experienced a housebreaking but only 44% of them reported it. Another 2% of households experienced a home robbery — the term used when the family was confronted — but only 58% of these households reported all or some of what the Americans call a “home invasion”.
In the same period, around 443,000 individuals were robbed on the street but only 44% reported it to the police. About a quarter of those robbed were injured, with two-thirds of them needing medical attention.
Around 295,000 South Africans were assaulted in 2023/24, more than half of them with a weapon, mostly a knife. Yet only 54% of them reported it.
Presenting the SAPS figures, Mchunu made a point that’s often lost in this punctilious tallying of losses and gains by officialdom. “These numbers represent more than just figures on a page,” said Mchunu. “They reflect the lived realities of our citizens—their fears, their losses, and their hopes for a safer tomorrow.”
Of course, it’s common for new ministers to emphasise the failures of their predecessors while promising to do better. Nevertheless, Mchunu does seem more empathetic towards the plight of ordinary South Africans, those not surrounded by ministerial bodyguards and escorted to and fro in blue-light convoys, than did the arrogantly disdainful Cele.
Follow WSM on Twitter @TheJaundicedEye
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