Crime is of central concern to South Africa’s citizenry. Far from being just dinner table talk, it seems to permeate every aspect of our society. From the President and his cabinet, the business community and actors in civil society, as well as ordinary South Africans bearing the brunt of increases in criminality, the critical importance of addressing spiralling crime has become a central issue for debate.
The spate of political speeches and conferences dealing with crime, as well as the fact that crime and security issues form the common denominator around which local government elections are being fought, are indicative of the urgency of the situation. Yet, despite the prominence of crime as an issue, we know surprisingly little about it as a phenomenon.
The perceived growth of crime in South Africa raises more questions than it can answer. How bad have increases in crime been? When did the general increase in criminality in our society begin? What are its causes and who does it effect? And, in the longer term, what hope is there for a reduction in crime?
At the outset, our understanding of criminality is complicated by the fact that we are unable to measure the extent of lawlessness or its costs effectively.
Recording crime relies on a two-stage process: victims or bystanders need to report the crime to the police who need to record it. In fact, both in South Africa and elsewhere in the world, only a small portion of crimes makes it that far.
The recording problem in South Africa has been further complicated by the historic division between people and police, the vagaries and divisions of apartheid recording practices and the blurring of boundaries between definitions of political and criminal activity.
Victimisation surveys - a random sampling technique to determine the extent to which ordinary citizens have been victims of crime - suggest that levels of unrecorded crime are substantial, which means that official crime figures only tell part of the story. In short, we are uncertain of the actual extent of crime in South Africa.
Unfortunately official statistics on crime are the only ones available. If they are to be useful they should not be analysed for minutiae and rejected out of hand, but probed for broad trends.
There is a common perception, for example, that crime in South Africa only began increasing from 1990 in conjunction with the beginning of the political transition. But, in fact, most serious crimes, notably murder, robbery and housebreaking, began to increase from the mid-1980s.
1990, however, did see increases in crime. The four years between 1990 and 1994 -which marked the core period of transition to democracy - showed a general increase in levels of criminality. According to official statistics, serious offences increased throughout the period while less serious offences declined. Robbery, for instance, has increased almost uniformly from 1990.
But the decline in less serious offences is the result of a recording phenomenon rather than an actual downturn: citizens are unlikely to report less serious offences if they perceive the police to be powerless to act. Similarly, the police may focus on more serious offences while ignoring those that are perceived to be less serious.
Overall though, increases in crime are unquestionable. Some sixty South Africans are left dead every day, another 2 500 severely injured through stabbings, beatings and shootings requiring hospital care. The approximately 21 000 crime related deaths that will occur during 1995 will outnumber deaths due to motor vehicles by two to one. South Africa leads a comparative measure of other countries and the proportion of citizens killed violently in crime related instances. With 57 violent deaths per 100 000 of the population per annum, the figure is nearly six times that of the United States.
But, increases in crime appear to affect different parts of society in different ways. This implies that, since not all South Africans are exposed to equal dangers, different strategies should be adopted in different areas to curb crime.
Thus, while crime in general has increased over the past decade, this does not necessarily apply to all forms of crime, nor do all areas of the country suffer uniformly. This is illustrated by regional differences in crime figures. The Northern Transvaal displays high levels of crime against property, but a comparatively low figure for crimes of violence. KwaZulu-Natal shows high levels for property and violence-related offences. The Northern and Western Cape show high assault figures, yet comparatively smaller readings for theft and housebreaking. The Free State consistently shows the lowest reported rate for all categories of crime.
These regional variations suggest that national crime figures may be deceptive, since levels of victimisation and forms of criminality vary between provinces. Car hijacking, for example, while feared nationally, almost always occurs in Gauteng. This conclusion is also reinforced by local police station figures which show that categories of crime vary considerably between station areas.
Related to this, citizens often needlessly fear some categories of crime. Indeed, those that fear crime the most - old people or women - are the least likely to be victimised while those that are least afraid - young urban men - are most likely to be victims. Of course, both the physical and financial effects of crime are often accentuated in the cases of weaker and older victims.
The problem of crime is an intractable one: comparative experience suggests that governments often simply cannot fulfil promises to end crime through a law and order ‘crackdown”. Research also suggests that simply increasing police resources seldom has an immediate effect on crime patterns.
Development, often seen as a panacea for crime prevention as it reduces the level of unemployment, may increase rather than reduce opportunities for criminality. In any event, evidence that the unemployed are more likely to commit crime is ambiguous.
In sum, the issue of crime is a complex one: criminality takes multiple forms and is driven by multifaceted causes. Not all South Africans are affected by crime in the same way nor, given these factors, are solutions to crime uniform.
Increasing levels of crime have generated greater interest in the issue in civil society and university based research bodies. However, much of the work to date, while being crucial in shaping the debate, has mostly illustrated what we don’t know rather than what we do.
To date the process has shown a number of weaknesses. Primary among these is a lack of a detailed and reliable source of hard policy data and research capability. In turn, while any future national crime strategy will be in a position to identify overall goals and directions for a crime prevention strategy, local level initiatives - given that crime has different faces in different areas - will need accurate and sophisticated information and policy advice to ensure their success. And, given the changing nature of policing and the research environment in South Africa, traditional areas of concern may no longer focus on areas that are increasingly becoming significant.
In response to the increasing demand to confront crime, policing and related issues head on, and recognising the dearth of local qualitative research on the topic, the Institute for Defence Policy has recently expanded its brief and initiated a comprehensive research project on Crime and Policing Policy.
Comprising several components, the Project - which carries the support of the Ministry of Safety and Security - aims to impact on practical policy issues through conducting rigorous research on specifically designed areas that have not yet received adequate attention from South African researchers. A detailed investigation and overview of crime, violence and policing research suggests that new areas of concern are emerging in relation to the future of policing and crime control in South Africa that will require detailed policy work. These include:
- a greater concentration on hidden areas of criminality like white collar crime, its extent in South Africa and potential policy options for control;
- an investigation into various crime prevention strategies;
- a detailed study of potential victim support strategies;
- policy evaluation of the prospects for effective means to police the cities, including an investigation into the viability of new forms of metropolitan and local authority policing;
- given the potential for growth in organised crime, an evaluation of the possibilities of this occurring and potential policy options with which any such developments could be countered;
- a detailed examination of the rapid development of private policing and this sector’s influence on and interaction with the public police;
- the potential for citizens to take the law into their own hands and to initiate forms of self-policing given the growth in criminality and the inability of the state to counter this; and
- an attempt to assess increases in crime in South Africa more thoroughly through measuring them against comparative experience with particular reference to other societies undergoing democratic transition.
The Project aims to produce a variety of research products on the issues concerned which can be disseminated to policy makers as well as a wider audience. It is necessary for the Project and IDP to be seen as the source of analytically rigorous research. Influence in the changing debate will rely on the timely release of research projects on relevant issues. The Project should actively seek to identify new areas and to shape emerging debates and aims to investigate areas which as yet have remained unconsidered by South African researchers.
The Project is co-ordinated and led by Mark Shaw who has published widely on crime, policing and related issues. He is supported by Lala Camerer, a researcher who has recently returned from Oxford where she focused on comparative social policy in relation to crime and victimisation in the completion of a Master’s Degree.
The Project, which will initially run for two years, is supported by the Open Society Foundation of South Africa, the British High Commission and further funding is being sought from the United Nations Development Programme and the Royal Netherlands Embassy.
