When Walter Coetsee* was walking from MuseuMAfricA in Newtown, Johannesburg, to another place of interest, he was attacked from behind. Strong arms grabbed him and he was punched in his Adam’s apple, leaving him out of breath. As a knife was held to his face, the tall blonde felt agile hands going through his pockets to rob him of his possessions, including cash and a digital camera.
“There must have been about eight of them,” he tells the Mail & Guardian Online. “They were obviously professionals, it was over so quickly.” Items of no financial value to the muggers, like Coetsee’s glasses, were neatly stacked behind him on the ground.
It struck him that witnesses to the crime turned their heads. “People were scared out of their brains. They saw what happened but made sure to look the other way.”
Minutes after he was mugged, Coetsee spotted a police officer in a nearby street and reported the crime. No wonder he was mugged, said the police officer: “You’re white. You shouldn’t be here.”
People in South Africa are scared of rampaging crime. Robbery, of course, is only one of many crimes over which South Africans obsess. With constant reports in the media of carjackings, rapes and murders, and with friends and family readily sharing their personal brushes with violence, it is no wonder that crime and safety issues are on many minds.
Some cry out for tougher punishments for offenders and for the police to act harder. Some spend thousands of rands on electric fences, security guards, scary-looking dogs, alarm systems and other private security measures that make them feel safer. Others flee the country altogether, saying they cannot cope any more with the worrisome crime levels.
Are these people’s fears grounded? Is crime getting worse? Is it spiralling out of control? Statistics say it is not. Last year’s South African Police Service (SAPS) records show that many serious crime levels were down. Compared with 2002/03, violent crime (murder, attempted murder, serious assault and rape) had fallen by 8% and property crime (aggravated robbery, common robbery, car theft and housebreaking) by 11%.
However, crime statistics are not always as reliable as they seem to be. Antony Altbeker — crime expert, researcher linked to the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Pretoria and author of The Dirty Work of Democracy: A Year on the Streets with the SAPS — says three things have to happen before a crime makes it into the books: “First and most obviously, it has to be noticed. Second, the crime has to be reported, and finally the crime has to be recorded — and accurately recorded, for that matter.”
Under-reporting is a known problem to researchers who study crime. Mugging victim Coetsee might have ignored the possibly well-intended comments by the police officer and pressed charges, but a lot of people don’t report what happened to them — either because they feel it doesn’t make a difference or because they feel the crime to which they fell victim was only a minor one.
Some types of crime are known for under-reporting, rape being one of them. Statistics on rape are therefore not very reliable.
According to Altbeker it is not always in the best interest of the victim for a crime to be recorded. “A lot of cases of domestic violence are better resolved without recording. That way people are spared the massive inefficiencies and horrors that accompany the recording process. Police get called on thousands of cases of domestic disturbances a month where arrests are inappropriate — I’m talking about emotional abuse here, not severe physical abuse. To arrest a father, a husband, or a son and throw them in jail for the weekend is not always best.”
So, some cases are legitimately not recorded. There are, however, also crimes that are illegitimately not entered into the books. It worries Altbeker that people are turned away when reporting rape. “I can only imagine that police have a sliding scale of what they consider rape. An example is date rape. Equally bad is when people wanting to report hate crimes are turned away. That happens especially with lesbians coming in.”
Not only the police have a sliding scale. It can be hard to decide when a crime should be included in crime statistics. Altbeker recounts an anecdote from when he was accompanying the police on their rounds in a township for research purposes.
“We were driving around when we spotted a group of boys, approximately aged 16 to 18. There was some pushing and shoving with the police officers, some swearing. Later we met another kid that said he had just been mugged by that same group. We drove around for hours trying to find them again, but no luck.
“Just when we were about to leave, we found some of them and they were apprehended. Taking all the statements, one of the officers said to me, ‘It’s a pity if we record this. Robbery looks bad in the books.'”
The total amount of money that was stolen from the kid rounded up to about R5 or R6, and nobody was hurt. The crime was not recorded. Altbeker says: “It still was robbery and therefore the police were wrong for not recording it, but you can understand the ambivalent nature of some of these cases.”
There are only two SAPS crime statistics that are truly reliable, according to Altbeker, who describes himself as “mad about crime”. The first is murder. “Police cannot refuse to record a murder for obvious reasons. And then there is also a body to account for.” The other concerns car theft and carjacking. “These tend to be well reported for insurance purposes.”
Both murder and carjacking rates have declined over the past years. Last year’s count of carjackings was 12Â 434, according to the SAPS; in 2002/03 it was 14Â 691. Murders totalled 18Â 793 in 2004/05, with 21Â 553 two years prior to that. The number of reported incidences of murder and attempted murder is considerably lower than just after the birth of democracy in South Africa in 1994.
One would think these positive trends would comfort people. Still, that does not seem to be the case. Is it thus a matter of mere perception that crime is exploding? Many point a finger to the media and extensive coverage of crime. High-profile cases are bound to influence people’s minds, they say.
Altbeker doesn’t think the media are solely responsible for people’s fear of crime. “I don’t want to give that much power to the media,” he says. “It is too easy an explanation. We have been hammered by the same headlines for years. It might just be wishful thinking on behalf of policy makers to blame the media. There are over 50 murders a day in South Africa; I can’t believe that media coverage of 10 murders a week is to blame for the feeling that crime is on the rise.”
When Crazy Monkey actor Brett Goldin and his fashion-designer friend Richard Bloom were killed in Cape Town a few weeks ago, Altbeker was bombarded by phone calls from the media, asking him if crime was getting out of hand. “In the five days that case was heavily reported on, some 250 more people had been murdered! Media stories don’t reflect reality.”
Altbeker believes there are three main reasons for the massive feeling of insecurity, with a major point being that statistics and perception are not measured on the same scale.
“Perception and feelings of insecurity are determined by the amount of crime ever experienced [by an individual]. It accumulates, whereas statistics only look at a certain time frame. On a personal level it just does not work that way; you can’t start over and say, ‘Oh well, let’s delete everything I’ve experienced and heard before last year.'”
He also blames changes in society. “South African society changed dramatically over the last 10 years. Urbanisation rates are through the roof. Naturally it leads to fear if you remove yourself from your familiar surroundings to a place where you don’t know the ones around you, where you lack a proper network, and where ways of interacting with one another are different.”
“Lastly, I think that a lot of anxiety translates into fear,” Altbeker concludes. “I am no psychologist, but I think fear of crime is a way in which fear of other things expresses itself. As a whitey you might fear losing your job, or you might say the ANC’s [African National Congress] policy is resulting in horrible excesses of crime when you really fear the broader political situation.”
The age at which offenders commit felonies can be used to explain the drop in crime rates, according to Altbeker.
Violent crimes are mostly committed by young males between 15 and 25 years of age, he says. “Call it testosterone related.”
Murder rates have been going down for years, he adds. “There are various reasons to explain this. It might be because of improved policing, more cops, more focused crime-fighting tactics and a more vigorous approach to firearms.
“It might be that more people receive social grants, helping them to moderate levels of interpersonal stress and aggravation. But another explanation uses time as an important factor; it’s a so-called cycle-of-violence theory. September 1990 went down in the books as the most violent month in South African history. Now, 15 years after that worst apartheid violence, we live in a more stable society where people have learned habits of self-control.
“It is believed that if you experience extreme violence as a child, you have a greater tendency to become violent at a later age. So when the children of apartheid reached [the age of] 15 to 25, they would turn violent themselves. Now they have outgrown that violent age group again, and with that crime rates have fallen too.”
Most violent crime happens in townships around major cities, not in the suburbs. It is a fact that most murderers are young black males. But it is also a fact that most murder victims are young black males. Murder rates of white people are two-thirds lower than the national average.
“If you ask me whether white people are more often the target of crime than 10 years ago, I’d say absolutely,” says Altbeker. “But if you ask me if they are more targeted than five years ago, I’m not so certain. There has been a redistribution of violence after the end of apartheid. But it is not just whiteys that express more fear, it is everybody.”
Statistics and public opinion don’t go well together. It seems South Africans truly want to believe that things are getting worse, that crime is getting out of hand. One influential theory in psychology addresses “cognitive dissonance”. In 1957, social psychologist Leon Festinger at Stanford University came up with a theory where individuals seek to avoid inconsistency among their cognitions (that is, beliefs or opinions) by changing their behaviour or attitude — but attitudes are difficult to change.
Now, if one feels a certain way about crime but the statistics point in another, one can either question one’s own judgement or try to discard the numbers. Which would be easier?
* Not his real name