SA crime shifts: Kidnappings and extortion skyrocket

Has SA’s devastating tsunami of violence – more than 25 000 men, women and children murdered annually – peaked at last?

The release of the crime statistics for the second quarter of 2024-25 appears to offer a rare moment of relief.

Murder was down in the second quarter by 6% to 6 545 killings and there was a drop of 3% to 10 516 rapes. Robbery with aggravating circumstances was down by 9% and common robbery by 6%.

Progress is, of course, never unambiguous. Attempted murder was up 2%, while assault to inflict grievous bodily harm and attempted sexual assault were both up by 1%.

But far more significant than these statistical swings and roundabouts is the fact that the very nature of SA’s criminal landscape is evolving in disturbing ways.

The new crimes of kidnapping and extortion have, over the past few years, become the country’s fastest-growing criminal trends.

ALSO READ: 55 foreigners arrested, one person fined for employing undocumented immigrants

The incidence of kidnapping shows a breathtaking 264% increase in the past decade. In 2014-15, there were 4 692 kidnappings and in 2023-24 there were 17 061.

Lizette Lancaster, crime hub manager at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), tells me that explosion in kidnappings is because these are “a type of high reward, low risk operation, because the victims and their loved ones are so compliant because of fear … It’s fear not only for the victims but for the family because details get shared and the criminals know where people live, what cars they drive, that kind of thing.”

An ISS analysis shows that aggravated robberies accounted for 66% of all kidnappings, with 44% committed during a hijacking and 22% during another type of robbery. Lancaster calls it a “displacement in method”.

Extortion is also significantly underreported. In the five years to March 2024, police recorded 6 056 extortion cases, which resulted in only 2 389 arrests and a meagre 178 convictions.

At the corporate end of the extortion industry are the construction mafias.

Spuriously claiming the protection of preferential procurement regulations that 30% of a construction development project should benefit the local community where it is sited, the mafias, under the guise of “business forums”, demand massive cash payouts.

ALSO READ: Acting principal shot six times on school premises

Many of these acts of extortion go unreported because the companies are afraid of violent retribution against their staff, or because police are reluctant to act.

The shifting nature of the criminal landscape and the difficulty of discerning its true proportions given what Lancaster calls the “dark figures” is encapsulated in a study this year by another ISS researcher, Vanya Gastrow.

What she found was that it was likely that the form of criminality, not its substance, had changed in the Western Cape. The foreign national small business owners who disproportionately had been the victims of such robberies were now, instead, paying extortion fees.

She quotes a Somali community leader’s interview in a Global Initiative Against Transnational Crime report: “[The gangsters] told us: ‘Look, you can give us money per month, then you will never be killed and you will never be robbed. The police will do nothing for you. So, are you going to agree or not?’”

Police Minister Senzo Mchunu recently told a summit called to coordinate a Saps/business response to construction extortion, that the mafia threats and violent intimidation presented a critical choice for SA between legality or chaos and lawlessness.

That may be true for how the giant corporations to crime. But for ordinary citizens, the only “choice” they have is to comply or die.

NOW READ: ‘These teachers must go’: Over 16 000 with criminal records still in classroom