Over the past week, as much as it has been both stark and refreshing to see and hear politicians of every stripe and affiliation admit that SA’s crime problem is a social and economic threat that needs urgent attention, it has been equally frustrating to hear lacklustre “solutions” bandied about. Again.
A large part of that frustration stems from hearing President Cyril Ramaphosa and DA leader John Steenhuisen admit over and over again in the Oval Office that SA is a violent country with a high murder rate, as if both of those phenomena are a simple fact of life; in other words, SA is a violent country the same way that water is wet and the sky is blue.
We simply cannot be at a point where two of the most powerful political leaders in the government are this glib in the way they speak about our crime levels, and then pivot instantaneously to trade, investment, Starlink, ShotSpotter satellites, ballistics software and other pieces of technology as a “solution”.
Instead what we need is a real reckoning and a cold, sober admission that our spiralling crime problem will and should mar the track record of all of our public officials.
The vast majority of researchers on crime, violence and policing across the world will tell you that murder rates are one of the most effective data points for understanding both the general levels of violence across any given jurisdiction, and measuring police performance in relation to these and other categories of crime.
When I wrote Can We Be Safe? The future of policing in SA in 2021, the number of murders reported between January and December of that year was 23,758 and the per capita murder rate was 42 per 100,000 population. That represented a 65% increase from a low of 15,554 murders a year a decade earlier, in 2011/12.
Worse yet, the murder detection rate (the number of murder cases successfully investigated in which the positive identification, arrest and charging of the perpetrator took place) in 2021/22 was 14.5%. That murder detection rate was down from 15.37% in 2020/21 and 21% in 2018/19.
Since then, police performance in relation to the murder rate has absolutely cratered. At end-December 2024 there had been 26,232 murders reported to the police; there was a sharp increase recorded in the per capita murder rates in the Eastern Cape and Gauteng; and the national murder detection rate had fallen even further, to just more than 12%.
Nothing about this rapid worsening of the levels of violence in our country or the slow, grinding collapse of the SA Police Service (SAPS) in the face of this growing tide of violence is a fact of life. It is a political and moral failure on the part of our leadership.
In writing this piece I spoke to two experts on security, crime and policing to figure out what is behind the steep decline I have outlined above, and I was not surprised by their responses, mostly because they were similar to what I wrote about more than four years ago.
The experts — Irvin Kinnes, an associate professor from the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Criminology, and Gareth Newham, head of the justice and violence prevention programme at the Institute for Security Studies — identified the proliferation of illegal guns and a lack of police accountability as having the most corrosive effect on public safety.
More than that, they agreed that the factor that represents the biggest challenge now, and is likely to derail efforts towards improving public safety in the near future, is corrupt police officers. This corruption throughout the SAPS — both small and mundane, and large and existential — has led to the leaking of thousands of guns from police evidence lockers into the hands of criminals, and hamstrung multiple investigations into organised crime.
Ignored or downplayed
With the national police leadership embroiled in either its own scandals or distracted by infighting and jostling for power, the problem is ignored or downplayed in favour of quick fixes such as ballistics software ShotSpotter being rolled out across the Cape Flats, or Starlink satellite connectivity for rural police stations.
Nothing about what it will take to meaningfully address violence and crime, or to overhaul the SAPS, is flashy or even headline-grabbing. It requires deep and deliberate work that no conventional economic policy fix such as a public-private partnership or a tech-savvy tool is going to deliver fast results on.
That is precisely why we need politicians and police leaders who not only acknowledge that we have a crime problem and a police institution that needs urgent intervention, but who also show us that they understand the scale and severity of the problem at hand.
Unlike us, the politicians have VIP protection and guarded homes. Unlike us, they can distance themselves from the violence on farms and the violence meted out by gangs. That places an even greater burden on them to muster the political will to tackle police corruption head on.
Mere lip service cannot be enough any more.
• Stuurman, an independent political risk analyst, is author of “Can We Be Safe? The future of policing in SA”.
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