Why release the stats if they’re not used to fight crime?

Police Minister Senzo Mchunu on Friday released crime statistics for the first half of the year, explaining that they are “a stark reminder of the urgent need for action”. Erm, thanks for that but isn’t he the person paid to take that action?

Surely there’s more to being a police minister than collecting statistics and disseminating them to the public.

What’s the point of crime stats?

A great illustration as to how the stats are merely a formality to the ministry is that the first quarter results were delayed until now because of the election. In what world does an election prevent the existence of statistics or give any reason to delay them? More alarmingly, in what world could one think it’s okay to simply admit that they don’t want to share bad crime data because of an upcoming election? It sounds predictably manipulative and perverts the point.

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So, what’s the point of knowing how many murders there were in South Africa over a given period of time? One may assume it would be to track the safety of the country but in isolation, what good is that? Are the families of the 2 250 murdered people in the Western Cape supposed to take comfort in knowing that there were 2 994 murders in Gauteng? Is somebody who was raped supposed to feel supported in the knowledge that they suffered along with a reported 9 308 other people?

Thirty-nine police officers were murdered but of them, only 10 were on duty at the time, which begs the question: how safe are the people who are tasked with keeping us safe?

Crime data only a tool

Stats are the beginning and end points. They show us how things look and tell us how our interventions are addressing the matter. That alone does not stop crime. There’s a little something in between that is required. Cape Town Central Station has nearly a 200% increase in community-reported serious crimes in four years. Surely somebody must be looking at that and thinks, hmmm that needs to be addressed.

44 murders were pinned down to “taxi-related” causative factors but nobody is pulling the taxi industry in and asking what’s going on here. 224 murders and 3 445 assaults took place at liquor outlets. How many licences have been suspended? How are 12 murders allowed to take place on an educational institution’s ground yet we never hear of revocation of qualifications or some internal sanction?

Were the 18 fewer murders in Hillbrow a result of there being fewer people to kill or are the police doing something right and why has that not translated to Nyanga where there were 31 more murders?

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2 686 of the murders were conducted by firearm with the next highest being knives at 836. What have we done with this information? Certainly not investigated how firearms are procured even if it could half the number of murders.

We can see that there are twice as many rapes in the Eastern Cape compared to Gauteng. Is there something in the water there?

Pouring over the stats does indeed tell a sobering story so once sober, shouldn’t we be using our clear heads to look and see if we have a lot of usable data that we can actually use? It’s incredibly frustrating that we put so much effort into collecting this data as if it’s a product itself. The safety of the public should be the product and the data a tool for reaching that.

In South African fashion though, we get given the sombre detail and then hope to live another three months so we can get the next results. Unless, of course, there’s an election. The slog has no value to the public.

Fortunately, it’s easy to make it valuable to the public; we just need to convince some decision-makers to actually use it.