How a quarter of 1% of murders happened on farms in the past quarter

Releasing the quarterly crime stats on Friday, Police Minister Bheki Cele also touched on the issue of attacks in rural areas.

He said that there were 182 attacks on farms and on smallholdings in the first quarter of 2020/21 and that 119 of the incidents were motivated by robbery.

There were 15 murders in all.

The statistics covered the period April 2021 to June 2021.

The overall murder rate was as high as ever, though, with 5,760 people killed – an indication that the many murderers in South Africa have been returning to business as usual after there was a massive drop in violent crimes in 2020 during the level 5 hard lockdown, when murderers were not able to kill anyone while working from home.

The 15 farm murders represent 0.26% of the total during the period in question – a quarter of 1%.

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Stock theft dropped by 8% from 2020, with a drop of 13.5% since 2019. The biggest decrease was in the Eastern Cape, which reported 398 fewer cases.

 “All assault categories reported double-digit increases compared to the distorted 2020/2021 reporting period,” Cele said.

A total of 76,936 cases of common assault and assault GBH were opened with the police in the three months.