THE CRIMES IN SOUTH AFRICA

The Crimes in South Africa

The Crimes in South Africa

Introduction

In this essay, I look at the crime in South Africa (SA) and how it has become a major governance problem. Crime is not an unproblematic pre-existing objective entity, which is static and unchanging over time. How it is constructed, and controversies over its nature, and extent are constituted by, and are constitutive of power relations within society. The regime never kept adequate crime statistics, the question of whether crime increased or decreased with the demise of apartheid is not a simple yes. Whilst I do not attempt to answer the question of whether a crime has increased in the 'new' SA, I do question the 'transition leads to more crime' account and offer a more grounded sociological explanation for why crime plays such an important role in governance, in post-apartheid SA. The interconnected themes that I explore here are the changing relationship between crime and politics as the African National Congress (ANC) went from being a resistance organization to being the governing party, and the changing relationship between crime and race (Garoupa, 2002).

Discussion

Reasons of the crimes in South Africa

Crime is always newsworthy when there is not something else, like an aero plane crash, for example, to occupy the front pages of the dailies. In SA, the race and class of the victim play a crucial role in the interest factor. Before the dismantling, of apartheid started in the late 1970s, the brutal murders of whites were deemed newsworthy. It is probably because of their infrequent occurrence, whereas crime in black townships was not reported. Victimization is the flip side of criminalization, just as colored and black men was disproportionately criminalized under apartheid so, too, were colored and black crime victims largely ignored by white South Africans. In the 'old' SA, laws such as the Immorality and Group Areas Acts functioned to uphold apartheid ideology by criminalizing what was legal in other societies. One of the reasons given for the need for the community to be directly involved in combating crime was because political offenders tried to 'poison' the community's mind against the 'handhawers' of law and order (Hope, 2000).

Number of the crimes

A longitudinal analysis of total national crime recorded annually shows that overall crime levels peaked in 2002/03, after which there was a gradual decline until 2007/08 when crime started to rise once again. There are no clear explanations as to why totals crime decreased by 25 per cent until 2007/08 before increasing by four per cent since then. In this regard, South Africa is not exceptional. What the statistics reveal; However, is that 97 per cent of the increase in total crime levels over the past two years is being driven by increases in the following five property-related crime categories:

Shoplifting increased by 32 per cent or 21 642 cases; Commercial crime increased by 30 per cent or 19 556 cases. (Since 2004/05, the absolute numbers of this crime have increased by 57 per cent)

Residential burglary increased by ...