Tangeni Amupadhi
While police statistics show a decrease and a ”stabilisation” in serious crime over the past four years, a research agency has predicted criminality will increase over the next seven years.
The Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) says in the Nedcor/Institute for Security Studies (ISS) Crime Index that murder, burglary and rape could shoot up by 25% by the year 2005.
HSRC statistician Diana Ehlers was, however, quick to point out they were merely ”playing” with figures to show that crime trends can be predicted and that the forecast was based on population growth alone. Other factors, such as unemployment, economic deprivation, urbanisation, political instability and increased public awareness of crime, which are usually used in these kinds of predictions have not been applied.
”The murder rate can be expected to rise by 8% to the year 2000 and 23% to 2005, burglaries will increase 5% to the year 2000 and 15% to 2005 and the incidence of rape will increase by 9% to the year 2000 and 25% to 2005,” stated the report.
Ehlers said the prediction’s accuracy was affected by unreliable data gathered during the apartheid years. Data gathered before 1994 are not regarded as reliable, partly because police priorities before 1994 focused on some crime categories over others, and because information from former homelands was not included in national figures before 1994. The HSRC used police statistics of the past 10 years.
Gideon Pimstone, who co-wrote the report, said predictions of crime trends should be taken seriously, especially by policy makers as these assist in taking steps to prevent crime. Such forecasts are used worldwide.
But he cautioned that the report was ”not to be taken literally” as the intention was simply to show that ”an increase in population will lead to an increase in criminality”.
Minister of Safety and Security Sydney Mufamadi this month released police statistics showing categories of serious crime were either declining or have levelled off over the past four years, with rape the only crime to show an increase.
”It seems from the statistics that crime isn’t getting much worse, but do we want it to stay at these high levels?” asked Antoinette Louw, a researcher for the ISS.
High levels of crime do not only affect the ordinary public, though. According to the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR), police have become a fashionable target of criminals. In the first six months of last year the number of officers murdered was up 29% to 119 compared with the same period in 1996.
”Figures show further that police officials are four times more likely to be murdered than members of the public,” said Andrea Helman, an SAIRR researcher. More than 90 officers committed suicide last year, an increase of 24%.
There had also been a rise in the number of complaints about and convictions of crooked police officers. More than 50 policemen were convicted of corruption-related charges in 1997, compared with 15 in 1996.
Superintendent Welma Nortje, of the South African Police Services management division, said corruption has been detected through all the ranks of the South African police and complaints cover all crimes, including car theft, armed robbery, drug trafficking and bribery.
Nortje said the increase may be attributed to the fact that ”now there are ways and means to get it in the open”, referring to the anti- corruption unit set up two years ago to rid the police of bad apples.