Crime Statistics for South Africa

Summary

We will have a look at the crime statistics in South Africa from 2005-2006 to 2014-2015.The dataset includes information about province, station and crime type.

• Data source

• You can find some official presentation with various category definitions in the Crime situation in South Africa pdf

17 Community Reported Crimes

We will start by checking the “17 Community-Reported Serious Crimes”. Those 17 crimes are related to 4 categories which include Contact crimes, Contact related crimes, Property related crimes and Other serious crimes. We will check later what each category is made of.

These 17 crime types don’t include what is labelled as “4 Crimes Detected as a result of Police Action”:

• Illegal Possession of firearm and ammunition

• Drug Related Crimes

• Driving under the influence of alcohol and drugs

• Sexual offences detected as a result of police action

• Gauteng’s province is clearly above other provinces in terms of number of crime. Northen Cape seems to be safest province.

• The number of crimes decreased in most provinces between 2005-2006 and 2014-2015.

• Gauteng and Eastern Cape strongly improved between 2005-2006 and 2014-2015.

• Western Cape and Limpopo’s crime situation deteriorated.

Four crime categories

17 Community Reported Crimes is made up of four categories:

• Contact Crimes

• Contact-Related Crimes

• Property-Related Crimes

• Other Serious Crimes

• Contact crimes category decreased by almost 18% from 2005-2006 to 2014-2015.

• Contact crime category is made of:
  • Murder
  • Sexual Offences
  • Attempted Murder
  • Assault GBH
  • Common Assault
  • Common Robbery
  • Robbery Aggravated including the following TRIO Crimes: Carjacking, Robbery Residential, Robbery Non Residential

• Property related crimes stay pretty stable other time despite a small increase since 2010-2011.

• Property related crimes are made of:
  • Burglary at residential premises
  • Burglary at nonresidential premises
  • Theft of motor vehicle and motorcycle
  • Theft out of or from motor vehicle
  • Stock theft

• Contact related crimes is the lowest crime category. It is made of Arson and Malicious damage to property.

• Other serious crimes include: Other Theft, Commercial Crime, Shoplifting.

• We are now going to check the evolution by Province.

• Those 4 categories are pretty similar in term of proportion from one province to another.

• We can notice that the share of contact crimes decreased in each province while the property related crimes increased.

• Let’s check now all crime types

Focus on Western Cape

Moving forward, we will focus on Western Cape. Mostly because crimes are increasing and it is the second highest crimes province.

• Colours indicate if each station is above or below the Western Cape crimes’ median

• The “toner” mapstyle has been chosen instead of the “watercolor” style (that you can see at the beginning of the notebook) in order to show the main roads as well as the borders of the Western Cape province (delimited by the dotted line)

• Most of the stations which are above the crime median are located in Cape Town. It is most likely due to the density population which is probably higher.