Gauteng won out over other South African provinces in the number of house robberies committed in 2019-20. (Photo by Silas Stein/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Gauteng won out over other South African provinces in the number of house robberies committed in 2019-20, according to Pretoria-based data collecting company AfricaScope, with 12 areas identified among the country’s top 30 housebreaking hotspots.
And solving crimes, specifically house robberies, will take a lot of effort from the police working with the public, according to Craig Schwabe, co-founder and director of AfricaScope which conducts research surveys and geospatial services to make information available for strategic decision-making.
Crime figures for Gauteng’s — and the country’s — economic capital Johannesburg this year point to an increase of 1.3% in residential robberies, while those at business premises decreased by almost 7%. According to Statistics South Africa, the number of houses that get broken into has increased from 2.1-million in 2015-16 to 2.3-million in 2019-20.
Crime in South Africa is often violent and deadly. The latest crime statistics released by the South African Police Services (SAPS) in May showed that 4 967 people were murdered in the country during the first three months of this year alone.
According to AfricaScope, Johannesburg’s Honeydew, Douglasdale and Sandton areas have ranked among the top hotspots for house robberies over the past year.
Schwabe believes there needs to be a social compact between community policing forums (CPFs) and the police in grappling with crime.
“We need to look at that aspect critically,” he told the Mail & Guardian.
The SAPS said in February the number of violent crimes had rapidly increased especially between October and December 2020, after the government relaxed Covid-19 lockdown rules that had kept such crimes in check earlier in the year.
Critics say the campaign to tame crime is often undermined by shoddy police work resulting from a lack of accountability.
“I will put it out that, during the former years of police commissioners Bheki Cele (now police minister) and Jackie Selebi there was a very strong sense of accountability upon all station commanders,” said the former head of the Crime Information Analysis Centre at the SAPS, Dr Chris de Kock.
“A crime such as house robbery was expected to be reduced very drastically to a certain percentage.”
“Police management should be fully aware about hotspots and keep station commissioners accountable. Visible policing should be based on daily crime pattern analysis at station level. Townships cannot do much about their house robbery situations without help from the police,” De Kock added.
He said the fact that police seemed less in charge, as observed during last month’s looting and vandalism in the KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng provinces, had made the public lose trust in the system. Police, De Kock added, also did not trust members of the CPFs and seldom shared crucial information with them.
Much more information about the modus operandi of criminals at hotspots should be made available to the public, to enable communities to act, he said.
“The public should play a much larger role in terms of fighting this crime. Public must be educated on multiple barriers that can be used to combat housebreaking. House robbers nowadays are mobile people. Stop-and-searches can assist in this regard. The robbers enter these areas by vehicle. Street closures are also a deterrent,” he added.
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