Police minister Senzo Mchunu has called on the government and business to “aggressively” confront SA’s high murder rate.
The country’s crime rate was a source of embarrassment when President Cyril Ramaphosa met his US counterpart, Donald Trump, last week.
The Justice, Crime Prevention and Security Cluster (JCPS) was expected to meet this week to discuss how to tackle this issue as well as illegal immigration, Mchunu said in an interview with Business Day.
This cluster comprises the ministers of defence and military veterans, home affairs, international relations and co-operation, justice and correctional services, police and state security.
“Murder is now showing a decline, but it is still at high levels. We need to contrast this with the lived experience of South Africans. We are low on [technology] and the equipment that we are using is oldish, and the thugs have learnt we are behind. In a partnership, Business Against Crime in SA are willing to pay and discussions are at an advanced stage. New technology has to be brought to the centre and we are now considering buying above our budget. We need drones and track-and-trace systems urgently,” Mchunu said.
He acknowledged many of the tens of thousands of illegal foreign nationals arrested every week were often released back into the population instead of being permanently deported.
“Foreign nationals contribute significantly to crime in SA. The stats show that, and we cannot shy away from it any more. We urgently need a package of interventions which must include business compliance and how these people easily obtain papers,” Mchunu said.
SA has seen a significant decline in murders since the start of 2025, with the Northern Cape the only province to see an increase in its murder rate.
The latest crime statistics from the SA Police Service (SAPS) for the first three months of 2025 show that the number of murders in SA dropped by 12.4% to 5,727 murders.
This is an improvement from the same period in 2022, 2023 and 2024, where murders totalled more than 6,000 for the period.
But in the 2019 state of the nation address Ramaphosa said the government would seek to reduce violent crime by 50% within a decade.
During the meeting with Trump last week, both business tycoon Johann Rupert and Cosatu president Zingiswa Losi played a key role in tempering Trump’s misinformation campaign of a white genocide in SA, though both were also frank about the crisis of crime in SA.
Rupert stressed violent crime affected both black and white South Africans, pointing to gang-related murders on the Cape Flats after Trump aired a video depicting what he claimed was evidence of genocide perpetrated against white farmers.
Mchunu said the reality was that there were not enough front-line police officers.
“We have 5,500 new recruits ... the first batch is out in August and another batch in November. Unfortunately, we can’t do it in bigger numbers as we are hamstrung budget-wise,” Mchunu said.
He added that he was working with business to reform policing in SA.
“Once we equip pilot police stations, we want to see more visible policing and operations. Once we enable pilot police stations, we want to see if we can enable them to deal with outcomes-based investigations,” Mchunu said.
On the issue of successfully prosecuting murders in SA, Mchunu said the police, with departments of science and technology public works, and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, were building forensic labs in KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga, “so they can stop sending requests for pathology tests to Gauteng”.
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