The Best Blog Post On Crime

Have you ever visited a Police Station? There's an incredible generic sense of lethargy about the place. Have you ever dialled 10111? Remarkably you can dial the number and not get through. Did you know the police force comprises about 150 000 members, whilst private security companies employ around 300 000. How often do you see police vehicles patrolling your neighborhood? Unfortunately, even with effective policing there is not a system in place to process that huge population of criminals that would result (500 000 by some standards). And if there was a system, there would be nowhere to put them. Our current overcrowded prisons house about a third of the potential criminal population, at 160 000.

Below is an on the ground, eyes open account from inside suburbia. We South Africans need to wake up. No one is going to solve this problem for us, not the government, not the police. It's up to us to do something about our own personal safety, and the security of our loved ones, and our things. Check this out:
Where the truth lies: South Africa’s crime statistics

City Homicides Still Dropping, to Under 500

“What are you going to do, send cops to every house?” said Peter K. Manning, the
Brooks professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston. “We know that historically, homicide is the least suppressible crime by police action,” he added. “It is, generally speaking, a private crime, resulting from people who know one another and have relationships that end up in death struggles at home or in semipublic places.”

New York City is on track to have fewer than 500 homicides this year, by far the
lowest number in a 12-month period since reliable Police Department statistics
became available in 1963.

But within the city’s official crime statistics is a figure that may be even more striking: so far, with roughly half the killings analyzed, only 35 were found to be committed by strangers, a microscopic statistic in a city of more than 8.2 million.

By AL BAKER

If that trend holds up, fewer than 100 homicide victims in New York City this year
will have been strangers to their assailants. The vast majority died in disputes
with friends or acquaintances, with rival drug gang members or — to a far lesser
degree — with romantic partners, spouses, parents and others.

The low number of killings by strangers belies the common imagery that New Yorkers are vulnerable to arbitrary attacks on the streets, or die in robberies that turn fatal.

In the eyes of some criminologists, the police will be hard pressed to drive the killing rate much lower, since most killings occur now within the four walls of an apartment or the confines of close relationships.

For the rest of this astute New York Times article, go here.

NVDL: This is exactly South Africa's problem. What makes it so hard to solve is that a terrifically high fraction of crimes are perpetrated by South Africans that know each other; thus, in homes. The majority of violence against the vulnerable (women and children) is also perpetrated in homes.

Lucky Dube: Prophetic Lyrics from 'Crime and Corruption'

NVDL: 'Do you ever worry about your house being broken into
Do you ever worry about your car being taken away from you...
Do you ever worry about leaving home
and coming back in a coffin...'


From BBC News:
The latest crime statistics are truly horrifying. Last year a staggering 19,000 South Africans were murdered.
By comparison, Britain, which has a larger population, had about 700 murders in the same period.
And taking the most serious crimes as a whole, the situation is even grimmer.
Just over half a million South Africans are murdered, raped or assaulted every year.