Ted Leggett In yet another move limiting the flow of information between the police and the public, Commissioner Jackie Selebi has announced a moratorium on the release of certain crime statistics and threatened to fire those police members who communicate with the media. While he initially denied the existence of a moratorium, Selebi now asserts that it is necessary to temporarily withhold station level statistics while the data collection system is revamped. Regardless of its true intent, the moratorium and the way it was announced produce the appearance of political manipulation. Selebi’s flagship project is “Operation Crackdown”, which targets those station areas that have the highest crime rates. The moratorium applies to station- level statistics. Thus, it becomes impossible for the public to gauge the real effect of Selebi’s flagship project. This does not look good. The Ministry for Safety and Security is rightly concerned about the way South Africa’s public image is being tarnished by a highly questionable set of numbers. Crime statistics are always problematic and subject to easy manipulation. Levels of reporting, divergence in resources and definitional questions make most international comparisons absurd. For example, the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Report 2000 lists international crime figures with the following results: l Canada has one of the highest recorded rape rates in the world (267 per 100 000), second only to Estonia in the UNDP figures. l The rate of drug crimes in Switzerland (574 per 100 000) is more than 10 times that in Columbia (40 per 100 000). l The rate of total reported crimes in Denmark (10 508 per 100 000) is more than five times that in the Russian Federation (1E779 per 100E000) and more than 100 times that of Indonesia (80 per 100E000). This is not to say that crime statistics are meaningless. Within a given jurisdiction, they are particularly useful for mapping trends across periods. This process becomes more accurate as the area being tracked becomes smaller, because there is less variation in the style of reporting. Thus it is at the station level where trends over time are most accurately captured by police statistics, and it is precisely at this level that information will now be suppressed.
Whatever the ministry’s intent, a moratorium on information flow is not the solution. While all such information must be interpreted in light of its limitations, allowing it to flow as it has been will not create any new problems, while shutting things down will end the opportunity for trend mapping. In fact, it is only when new data collection methods are introduced that the old figures will truly become meaningless.
What the moratorium is really about is the inability of the government to come to terms with the role of the media and the safety and security ministry is a prime offender in this respect. While station-level statistics will surely continue to be generated, the ministry has paternalistically decided that it will not be released, so that the media does not misinterpret it. Such authoritarian measures do not impress journalists or international observers and the country’s reputation suffers every time clampdowns of this sort occur. Limiting access of the press to government information on one of the most important issues facing the nation has serious implications for our international profile, particularly given the fact that the region has recently been stigmatised by press abuses in Zimbabwe. Rather than wagging fingers at reporters and hiding data, the police need to get more actively involved in the generation and dissemination of information about the nation’s crime situation. If there are flaws in the system, these flaws should be revealed and statements qualified accordingly. It is by increasing the flow of information, rather than by scotching it, that the truth can best be conveyed to the South African public. Ted Legget is a researcher at the Centre for Social and Development Studies at the University of Natal