[imagesource: Cape Town Central City Improvement District]

We have to kick off here with a disclaimer.

This is not based on a release from the South African Police Service (SAPS), but rather on data taken from News24’s new app, CrimeCheck, which uses official crime stats from SAPS.

The app has been designed to help South Africans “understand the risks of becoming a victim in a country where crime levels are among the highest in the world”.

More on how it works via News24:

Using hundreds of thousands of official crime statistic records from 1 158 policing precincts, between 2017 to 2022, CrimeCheck provides a gauge of risk on a series of crime indices as well as on several individual crimes like murder and burglary.

The rate of crime is calculated per 1 000 people in a police precinct or 1 000 households in a precinct.

According to the stats used by CrimeCheck, the safest policing precincts in the country are Mpisi in the Eastern Cape, followed by Kwandengane and Hlababomvu in the same province.

When it comes to the worst, it’s all pretty close to home:

The most dangerous precincts – where residents have the highest risk of becoming victims of crime – are the Cape Town Central precinct, as well as Pietermaritzburg and Durban Central precincts.

With a population of 45 093 people, Cape Town Central experienced 7 493 crimes last year.

I have a few qualms with these stats. Sure, that’s the population, but hundreds of thousands of people (if not more) through this area because it’s a massive tourist hub.

Is that factored in at all?

I did some digging on the app and all the red around the CBD is not a great look:

However, when I hovered the map over the Cape Town Central precinct it said it was now 1 154 out of 1 158 in the national serious crime risk rank. That’s despite News24 naming it the most dangerous precinct.

Whatever the case, kudos to News24 for putting together a tool which took “several months” to build and “involved the processing of hundreds of thousands of official crime statistics from 1 158 policing precincts – from 2017 to 2022”.

More on its mechanics:

CrimeCheck provides a gauge of risk on a series of crime indices as well as on several individual crimes, like murder and burglary. It also provides detail of each of the more than 50 crime types in every precinct reflected in the South African Police Service’s data…

Using this view of crime data, CrimeCheck highlights some alarming insights, like precincts where the risk of dying violently is arguably greater than for a civilian living in a war zone, and many precincts are higher risk than you might think, while others are lower despite perceptions that they are dangerous.

South Africa’s crime stats have long been compared to a war zone. That’s a serious reality check.

Go ahead and click around CrimeCheck to check how your precinct holds up.

[source:news24]