SAPS’ message to SA: Feel comfortable. We love you.

Is South Africa a war zone? At least one weekend newspaper suggested as much. DA Shadow Police Minister Diane Kohler-Barnard said that the murder rate for 2013-2014 – 47 murders a day – was “what one would expect to be reported from a country at war.”

Unsurprisingly, Police Minister Nathi Nhleko doesn’t agree. But neither does he disagree particularly forcefully. “I’m not too sure about that description really,” he said mildly, when the suggestion was put to him at the New Age’s breakfast briefing on Monday. Nhleko said he’d need to see the technical definition of a war zone, in terms of numbers of dead, and so on.

So we might not be a war zone, at least until Minister Nhleko’s consulted a few textbooks. But the response from those in the know to the latest batch of crime stats has been fairly negative, to say the least. In particular, the increases in violent crime – including murder, hijacking and “violent property crimes” – is taken as seriously concerning.

Murder has now been on the rise for two consecutive years. As Institute for Security Studies and Africa Check reminded us, murder stats are likely to be among the most reliable indices of crime, because it’s one of the crimes most likely to be reported (partly because normally there’s a body).

The Mail & Guardian pointed out, however, that murder may not be the best measure of police performance, because “the vast majority of murders and serious assaults occur between people who know each other in circumstances where police prevention is near impossible”. This being the case, so-called “trio crimes” – robbery and hijacking, which are preventable through measures like visible policing – may be a more telling barometer. Here, too, the news wasn’t good, with an increase of over 4,000 cases from the previous year.

But the police won’t be deterred from spying out a silver lining in all this. And that is, to quote Minister Nhleko, that “statistically speaking, SA is still on a downward trend”. He also said that he did not consider murder to be “solely a policing matter”, as it “talks to the issue of social relations”.

Nhleko was flanked by his deputy Makhotso Sotyu and Police Commissioner Riah Phiyega, and all three were at pains to paint crime as something that couldn’t be stopped through police action only. There was much talk of public-private partnerships to reduce crime, and of South Africa’s violent crime issue as being a complex social problem.

Deputy Minister Sotyu pointed out that that in 2012/13, President Zuma established an inter-ministerial committee on the causes of crime. She didn’t elaborate on its findings, but you’ll discover that it came back with a similar discourse of “shared responsibility”. It also indicated that “while there was a myriad of research around men and what causes them to behave violently”, they needed more focus on “educat[ing] the girl child of her responsibilities to protect herself”.

Speaking of the girl child, one of the few “good stories to tell” in this year’s crime stats was the drop in “total sexual offences” by 5,6%. Groups like Rape Crisis have repeatedly called for these figures to be dis-aggregated, however, as the reporting now groups over 50 forms of sexual crime together, making it almost impossible to gain an accurate picture on the problem of rape in particular.

Phiyega indicated at Monday’s briefing that they might be prepared to “embrace” the idea of differentiated figures, although it’s hard to see what has taken them so long, since civil society has made the same call over and over again.

The other issue is that worldwide there is a trend of under-reporting sexual crimes. South African research suggests this is the case here as well. As such, there’s every reason to believe that the official sexual offences numbers are not reflective of the whole picture – and may even be only a fraction of the whole picture. This notion, though, is something that SAPS seems rigidly unwilling to countenance.

When it comes to reporting rape, Sotyu said on Monday, “Twenty years down the line we have tried our best to make life very easy, particularly when reporting at the police station level.” Her implication was that there was no good reason for a woman not to report a rape.

Shireen Motara, director of the Women’s Legal Centre, isn’t sold. “Our concerns remain that sexual offences are often under-reported because of secondary victimisation by the criminal justice system, starting with the police,” Motara told the Daily Maverick.

“Some police stations are helpful, but this is often the exception. Most police don’t understand or know the Sexual Offences Act and what their duties are. We find that police don’t always have a good working relationship with the Victim Empowerment Services based at the stations, which are often underfunded and lack space or privacy.”

On Monday, Sotyu stated firmly: “At the moment, I don’t believe there is an under-reporting.”

Estimates of under-reporting from bodies like the Medical Research Council have previously been as high as 24 out of 25 cases. It is alarming to hear senior figures responsible for SAPS denying that any under-reporting could be taking place, since at the least they might be working off a highly inaccurate picture of the full scale of sexual violence in South Africa.

Another major criticism always levelled at the crime stats is that by the time they land in the public lap, they are six months out of date. Why can’t crime stats be released more frequently, critics ask, particularly as a safety mechanism in terms of public information?

Because the Cabinet decided in 2005 that once-a-year reporting was sufficient, Phiyega says. And because monthly reporting would not be revealing in terms of identifying longitudinal trends in crime.

“You don’t pick up a trend line over a month,” Phiyega told the briefing. “When we report, we would like to have packaged information over a particular period.”

The Western Cape government is not persuaded by this argument. Community Safety MEC Dan Plato said last weekend that he would write to Phiyega and Western Cape provincial police commissioner Arno Lamoer to request that station-level crime statistics be released monthly.

“Crime stats should not belong only to the police but should be used to inform the public of risks in their communities and empower strategic action from the entire safety fraternity,” Plato told the Weekend Argus, pointing out that cities like New York provide weekly crime stats.

It doesn’t look like the national SAPS bigwigs will budge on this issue any time soon. While saying that the reason they released crime stats in the first place was aimed towards the “inculcation and cultivation of a democratic culture”, Nhleko reiterated the line about time being required to monitor trends.

Nhleko and Phiyega both urged the public to throw their weight behind the police, and not allow the few bad apples in the force to overshadow the “tens of thousands” of SAPS members who are committed to responsible policing.

“Feel comfortable. We love you,” Phiyega said at one point.

But there was an acknowledgement that the feeling might not always be mutual. Sotyu suggested that a “huge number” of murders are committed against the police themselves. This is an exaggeration: between 1 April 2013 and 31 March 2014, 68 police officers were killed in the line of duty, SAPS announced at their recent National Commemoration Day.

But that didn’t stop Sotyu from issuing a poignant plea to the public.

“We are begging the communities to work hand in hand with us in protecting the police,” she said. And there you thought it should work the other way round. DM

Photo: (Left) Police Minister Nkosinathi Nhleko speaks at the release of the 2013/2014 annual crime statistics in Pretoria, Friday, 19 September 2014. Picture: Werner Beukes/SAPA (Right) National police commissioner Riah Phiyega attends the release of the 2013/2014 annual crime statistics in Pretoria, Friday, 19 September 2014. Picture: Werner Beukes/SAPA

Read more:

• FACTSHEET: South Africa's official crime statistics for 2013/14, on Daily Maverick