SA’s murder rate drop is worth celebrating — but we need to be realistic

The latest crime statistics released by the South African Police Service reveal that the murder rate in South Africa dropped by 20% between the first quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of this year. It is a dramatic decline, worthy of massive celebration. And yet the debate around why this is happening might well decide our future as a nation.

There can be no doubt about the impact that violent crime has on South Africans. Everyone knows someone who has been attacked or killed violently. Either someone they worked with or someone in their family or someone in their community.

And their fear of that drives important currents in our politics.

It is the fear of crime that allows parties like the Patriotic Alliance, uMkhonto Wesizwe and others to say they will use violence against crime. They are essentially claiming that they will protect voters, that they will “deal harshly” with criminals. This in turn drives up the rhetoric in our society.

It also allows some parties and groups, such as March and March, to blame scapegoats for crime, such as illegal immigrants.

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It also allows police squads to kill suspected criminals with no consequences. While no police officer anywhere in the world should be constrained from firing back on criminals, the sheer number of cases of people being killed in provinces like KwaZulu-Natal suggests the police feel they can and must be assertive.

It is this fear of violent crime that leads so many people to not trust the police, the government or the state as a whole.

When more than half of South Africans, when asked, say they would prefer a military government to our current democracy, it’s likely that their fear of violent crime is a major factor in that.

It is what drives partners and parents to insist their partners and children tell them when they’re home safely. It’s a fear that can live inside you and control your life in the most insidious way.

This is why the debate around what is really happening with crime matters.

If it is a one-off, a statistical blip, with numbers that then rebound, that will continue to drive these difficult elements in our politics. If crime is declining it might open the space for the economy to grow and for many of the social tensions in our society to ease.

Perhaps the worst-case scenario is that the number of murders continues to rise but is not captured by the police.

This would mean the state no longer has an accurate understanding of the lived reality of South Africans. And people would know that, which would drive further levels of distrust in the state.

This is perhaps the scenario that Jonny Steinberg is pointing to when he asks, correctly: how could acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia announce such a decline without attempting an explanation?

Considering the well-deserved cynicism that greets the police, such progress should be explained. Even if it is not possible to offer a definitive explanation, it is rational to expect Cachalia to at least offer some thoughts.

Cachalia’s special adviser, the well-known crime expert Gareth Newham, has pointed out that the SAPS numbers cannot simply be a mistake. He explains how the figures are gathered and analysed before being published.

He says that 50% of our murders take place in just 12 policing precincts.

This is an astonishing figure, and it means that our crime is incredibly concentrated.

In his view, one reason for the big decline is the high-visibility efforts of the police under Operation Shanela. He also says that better intelligence-led policing is leading to more people being killed by police in gun fights.

While the deaths of people in gun fights should not be celebrated (and to be clear, Newham is not celebrating that), it does indicate that the police are clearly improving their detection and investigation of crime.

Finally, Dr Jean Redpath, who has studied crime for many years and is advising the Western Cape government, has cross-checked the SAPS murder figures with another set of data from the South African Medical Research Council.

It does appear that the SAPS figures are correct. The overlap is not perfect but taken together the two numbers show that murders are declining.

She also argues that the real reason for this is the end of load shedding.

This is an explanation that seems intuitively true. It is much easier to break into someone’s home if they have no power, no lights and no burglar alarms.

A lack of lighting also makes it easier to carry out murders, attack people and use violence to control certain areas.

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The real strength of her argument is that she had said publicly last year that crime rates would decline because of this, and so this latest data shows she was correct.

While it is worth celebrating a decline in our murder rate, this really means that we are now going back to where we were before load shedding became more intense.

In the years after the Covid-19 lockdown the murder rate exploded. This did coincide with the increase in load shedding intensity but other factors might also have been involved.

Whether it was just load shedding or the result of other factors will now be tested as the “load shedding effect” starts to ebb.

Mathematically, this depends on whether the murder rate goes back to what it was before the pandemic or settles at a higher or lower rate than that.

That said, Newham’s point about improvements in policing is important. If that has played a role it means we can expect improvements both from that and from the end of load shedding.

That means there is some hope to bring down our murder rate back to the lows we experienced during the period around 2010 (our murder rate peaked during the political violence and transition in the early 1990s and dropped until 2010, after which it rose again very slowly, peaking again in the post-Covid era until the declines over the past two years).

Of course, many will be hoping we could reduce crime still further.

But that would require substantial social change.

Much of this is because of our history.

Despite attempts by the democratic government from 1994 to ensure the rule of law applied equally to everyone, our apartheid and colonial history has ensured most people have no reason to trust the police.

During the State Capture period the police became corrupt. The intensity of the corruption among senior officers is currently on daily display at the Madlanga Commission.

This, along with the example of then president Jacob Zuma and many around him, gave people no reason to trust the police or the rule of law.

And consider the problems some areas face.

KwaZulu-Natal Police Commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi has said that the district of Umzinyathi in his province has so many problems that “almost every hitman we get is recruited from there, and they are recruited from a very young age”.

A brief look at the history of that area shows how often it has been embroiled in colonial conflict, before people were forcibly removed from the area after the Land Act came into force.

For young men in that area there are very few options other than crime and violence.

The same is obviously true of people living in areas controlled by gangs in the Western Cape.

The life chances of people born in those areas are completely different to people growing up in other parts of the country.

This shows how deep the roots of our violent crime problem are, and how much work needs to be done to resolve it.

Any decrease in violent crime and murder, for whatever reason, is worth celebrating. It is vital that we know why this happened and are able to build on what works.

But we must also be realistic. If Redpath is right the murder rate will not decline much further.

Which means many, many more South Africans will die violently, many more will be scared of violence, and certain political elements will use this to their advantage.

And in the end, the state itself will be weakened further, with negative consequences for everyone. DM