When the South African Police Service (SAPS) crime statistics were released in September 2015, the headlines were dominated by the news that crime increased from 2014 to 2015 in most categories.
While the sheer number of crimes committed in South Africa is definitely concerning, there is a bit of good news when looking at it in relation to the population growth and shifts in the geographic location of both suburbs and police districts. Using their comprehensive database of geo-demographic and asset related information, Lightstone set out to add some perspective to these numbers.
Looking at the geographic boundaries for police districts there has been an interesting shift that occurred from 2014 to 2015.
In Map 1 below, the black lines indicate the police districts that existed in 2014 and the red lines indicate the new police districts in 2015. Usually there is an overlap from year to year, but 2015 saw some major shifts in location for some police districts in the North West, Gauteng and Limpopo.
This means that crimes that were previously handled (and recorded) in a specific police district, would now fall under the jurisdiction of a different police district and will distort year on year comparisons.
With a rapidly increasing population crime levels are bound to increase. That said, we evaluated absolute crime values and crimes per 100,000 population for South Africa as seen in the table below.
There is a total of 38 different crimes as classified by the SAPS, which was grouped into the six 'SAPS Groups'. The crimes under 'Lightstone Group' particularly pertain to residential and non-residential crimes. Residential crimes include burglary at residential premises, malicious damage to property, and robbery at residential premises. Non-residential crimes include: burglary at non-residential premises, robbery at non-residential premises, and shoplifting.
When looking at the total absolute crime values of both SAPS Groups and Lightstone Groups, a 0.09% increase is observed, but when adjusted for population growth and looking at the crime rates per 100,000 population, we actually see a 1.63% decrease in crime.
We then broke things down further by comparing the population size and residential crimes per province. The ratio of the province with the least to the highest comparative residential crime rate is represented in the graph below and is ordered from the lowest residential crimes per 100,000 population (Limpopo) to the highest (Western Cape).
Lightstone has 9,647 areas identified as suburbs in South Africa. Through the use of a comprehensive dataset of property transactions, spatial data and other demographic information, we are able to estimate the population growth that occurred in each of these suburbs and combine it with the spatially distributed crime statistics on a suburb level.
The change in the crime rate for Residential, Non-residential and Total crimes is given below, and is based on the number of crimes per 1,000 households (HH). In the majority of suburbs, there was a decrease in all crime categories with a smaller proportion of suburbs experiencing an increase in the number of crimes per 1,000 households.
Looking at the breakdown according to property value segment, the distribution shows that suburbs across different value segments had similar experiences in crime growth, and also indicates that there is not any market segment that is significantly better or worse off than others compared to a year ago.
Crime affects every segment and every suburb, and although some suburbs saw an increase in crime, the majority of suburbs across all value segments experienced a slight drop in crime when taking the population growth into account.
