Drop the pretences

CRIME in the Northern Cape is down, according to the police. This is little consolation to the thousands of people in the Province who have fallen victim to crime in the last year. There were four less murders this year – that doesn’t mean much for the families of the 340 people who were killed. Rape also dropped by 43, but the 1 100 people who were raped is 1 100 people too many.

Just days before the Northern Cape Police Commissioner, General Risimati Shivuri, presented the crime statistics for the Province, Stats SA released its Victims of Crime Survey.

This paints a different picture. According to the Stats SA survey, more than 39 000 residents of the Province were victims of household crime, while just less than 35 000 were victims of personal crime.

The survey also shows that people in the Northern Cape are more likely to be victims of robberies and housebreaking than their fellow South Africans living in other provinces, with 23 678 incidents of housebreakings reported to the police in the last year.

And while the police commissioner states that 340 murders were reported, Stats SA puts the figure for murders and culpable homicide reported to the police at 665 for the year. The figure it gives for sexual offences reported to the police is 1 538.

Statistics are easy to fudge and a drop in a handful of cases does not mean that we are winning the war against crime.

And it also does not mean that the police service is becoming more effective. In almost

20% of the cases where local residents called the police, they failed to arrive. Thirty-five percent of the time, it took them more than two hours to respond.

Police officers are sometimes incapable of doing routine work, like taking proper statements and carrying out thorough investigations. Judges have expressed concern about the quality of statements taken by the police and cases are thrown out of court because the investigating officer hasn’t followed up. Insufficient training, coupled with a shortage of manpower, is largely to blame.

A written reply in Parliament shows that in 2013/2014, 72 police stations in the Northern Cape were understaffed, with a total shortage of 726 policemen. The chances are that this hasn’t improved.

There is no denying that the problem of crime is multifacited but it is also obvious that we need more dedicated police officers, better training and additional vehicles to fight crime in this Province and in the country.

We also need to stop pretending that it’s all good – it isn’t. The police and the government need to admit that there is a crisis and with almost half the population unemployed, it isn’t going to get better unless something is done.