Tangeni Amupadhi
THE banks and police have been concealing crucial information about the growing wave of bank robberies, including statistics that police apprehend only 10% of culprits.
The information reveals that the crime wave besetting South Africa is even worse than the public has been led to believe.
The Mail & Guardian has established that the top banks suffered more armed robberies last year than during the whole of the preceding 10 years.
The banks are also understood to be keeping records which show that 98% of the robberies have been carried out by black males.
Police and the Council of South African Banks (Cosab) agreed last year to withhold information of this kind – apparently because of fears that releasing details of the police’s low success rate would encourage more robberies.
Cosab this week again refused to release detailed information, saying that the decision to do so rested with its individual members.
However, the top four banks – First National Bank, Absa, Standard Bank and Nedcor – are close to finalising their own detailed study about the effects of burgeoning crime on them and this might be released soon.
A study by internal security divisions of the banks shows that they suffered 150 armed robberies from October 1995 to September 1996 – 50 more than during the preceding 10 years.
First National Bank suffered 20 robberies in the 12 months to 1987, with nine arrests. But this had jumped to 130 robberies in the 12 months to 1996, with just 12 arrests.
Police estimate that total bank robberies hit 600 last year. But figures for past years are not available and arrest rates cannot be given.
“The arrests and recovery rate is extremely low,” says Standard Bank’s head of security Ian Coutts. “We are concerned at the growth [in the incidence] and the authorities – the police, the courts and prisons – are not producing the kind of results that we want to see.”
Reg Crewe, head of the National Detectives Service, said half the 14 most-wanted bank robbers targeted last year had been arrested. Murder and robbery units, which also investigate bank robberies, were being “beefed up”.
Cosab’s chief executive, Bob Tucker, says: “There is nothing sophisticated about the robberies. It is just brutal … an unbelievably callous attitude towards the lives of all South Africans.”