Two places where our police can start to improve right now
Our “crime stats are not very rosy”, said a downcast police minister Bheki Cele, in what can best be described as a massive understatement. During Cele’s release of the country’s crime statistics on Thursday in parliament, the nation was alarmed, but not particularly surprised, that the murder rate had risen by 3.4%. To put this into perspective, 686 more people were murdered over the 2018/2019 reporting period, bringing the number of intentional killings to 21,022 — up from 20,336 the previous year. Not very rosy, and not very surprising.
One set of figures did horrify: the number of child killers. Out of those 21,022 murders, 736 people were killed by children.
The police statistics head, Maj Gen Norman Sekhukhune, said that when looking at “crimes or children in conflict with the law, we observed that some of these murders of children are committed by other children”. The most murders by children were in the Eastern Cape, with 231 cases, followed by the Western Cape with 170.
“Another figure that is quite concerning is common assaults committed by children — at 4,196,” he said.
The horror continues: every category of crime is on the rise, from sexual offences, which recorded the greatest hike of 4.6%, to armed robbery, which recorded the smallest increase, 1.2%.
We were shocked, but we should not have been. The cases of rape and femicide in the past two weeks point to how violent a society SA is, and how inured to the suffering of others we have become.
Cele indicated as much on Thursday, saying most victims were murdered by people they knew, and that the police could not prevent these killings. Fair enough.
The question is: are the police doing all they can to turn the country’s dire crime situation around? The answer, as you will see on our pages this week, is no.
Police data we report on reveals the unequal distribution of police resources at stations across the country. It strongly discriminates against poor, black communities. For example, in Diepsloot in Gauteng there is a ratio of 80 police officers for every 100,000 residents, whereas the ratio in affluent Rosebank,
Johannesburg, is 987 for every 100,000.
The data, contained in court papers in a matter before the Equality Court between the police and the Social Justice Coalition, Equal Education and Nyanga Community Policing Forum, shows that townships and rural areas, whose residents face most of the country’s crime, have far fewer police officers per capita than those in former white areas.
And then we complain about vigilantism and mob justice attacks when communities take the law into their own hands.
Elsewhere on our pages, you will read a depressing account of shoddy policing. A rape crisis centre investigated why incidents of rape reporting increased on Mondays when those rapes had been committed on weekends. “Go home, don’t bathe or wash your underwear for the next few days, and come back on Monday,” charge-office police officers reportedly told some women who had come in to report having been raped. “He only used his finger to penetrate you, it’s no big deal,” was another account, along with, “This case is weak, do you really want to put yourself through this?”
Last year Cele told the country that police management’s “heads are on the block” should they not make a dent in the figures. But on Thursday he backtracked on this, citing successes in some areas such as the reduction in numbers of cash-van robberies.
While it is commendable to allow the first stable police leadership in years to continue its work, there is much to improve on. Ensuring that poor, black communities receive their fair share of police officers, and not turning rape victims away from charge offices, are good places to start.
One set of figures did horrify: the number of child killers