S. Africa Crime Rises 25% in Many Areas as Police Focus on Quelling Black Unrest

With South Africa’s police deployed at nearly full strength to quell continuing civil unrest, ordinary crime has increased 25% to 30% in many urban areas in recent months, affecting many people much more than political violence.

Car thefts have increased 22%, burglaries are up 18% and “street crimes,” including muggings, armed robberies and assaults, are up nearly 29%, according to new government figures.

In Soweto, the black satellite city of nearly 2 million outside Johannesburg, robberies have doubled, according to the police there, and murders have increased 20%.

Four or five people are mugged every day on the streets of central Johannesburg, according to the police, and gangs of knife-wielding youths prey on office workers and shoppers in several downtown districts.

Over the last six months, 447 cars and trucks have been hijacked off the main roads that pass Alexandra, a black ghetto northeast of Johannesburg, and an average of 30 cars are stolen every day in the metropolitan Johannesburg area, an increase of 40% so far this year.

Although auto thefts are reported to have increased 10% nationally, insurance companies report that clients’ claims for auto thefts have risen as much as 86%.

In Cape Town, the country’s second largest city, businessmen have demanded that police declare war on “the rising wave of violent crime,” which in a series of particularly savage murders has spilled into formerly safe, white suburbs.

‘Unstated Emergency’

So great is the increase in crime, particularly over the last six months, that the Cape Times called it the country’s “unstated emergency,” referring to President Pieter W. Botha’s declaration three months ago of a national state of emergency to give the police greater powers to deal with the civil unrest.

The police “are so distracted by other directives involving the state of emergency that they cannot give full attention to what could be termed normal crime,” the liberal Cape Town newspaper said in an editorial urging a campaign to restore law and order to the city.

“By deploying such large numbers of police in the (black) townships, the force available to counter ordinary crime has been greatly reduced,” Dave Dalling, a member of Parliament from the opposition Progressive Federal Party, said Monday. “The normal crime investigation and prevention has taken a back seat to the political role of the police.”

Almost every South African, black and white, has a story to tell about not being able to get police help when it was needed.

A young Cape Town woman who called the police to complain that a man had followed her home and was threatening her was told that police had only a single patrol vehicle for that area and that she would have to cope herself.

“They asked me, ‘Do you have a gun?’ ” she recalled, “as if I were going to shoot the guy. They were not happy when I told them no.”

A hardware dealer in Port Elizabeth recalled how he and other merchants had asked for increased policing of a shopping district where there had been many robberies, assaults and auto hijackings. They were told there were no police available.

“We were told to hire armed guards if we wanted better policing,” he said. “The only other alternative, according to the police, would be bringing in the army. Think what a platoon of armed soldiers in front of our stores would have done for business.”

Acknowledging that the 48,000-member national police force is stretched thin, with an estimated 80% deployed in black areas on riot duty, a police spokesman in Pretoria commented, “The police do their best with the available manpower, and we are still capable of achieving a reasonable success rate in solving crimes.”

Although the government has acknowledged a 7% increase in “serious crimes” nationwide over the last year, other figures clearly show that the rise is much greater in particular categories and in certain areas.

Brigadier James Beeslaar, commander of the police force’s criminal investigation division in Soweto, said that during the last weekend, for example, there were nine murders and four attempted murders reported to the police, 90 muggings, 12 rapes, 14 car thefts and more than two dozen assorted burglaries, robberies and other thefts.

“About average,” Beeslaar said, noting that crime has increased dramatically over the last six months.

Police Buildup Planned

Louis le Grange, the minister of law and order, said over the weekend that the government intends to build up the police to remedy this problem. He said that the 7,500-member special railways police will be incorporated into the national police force next month and that 6,000 new policemen will be trained each year until the force totals 94,000.

In addition, 6,000 local black policemen are being trained, he said, and 1,000 new “special constables” have been recruited.

The latter are undergoing short training courses before being assigned to augment the police in such troubled areas as Johannesburg, Cape Town and eastern Cape province near Port Elizabeth. The program has drawn quick criticism that the constables will be little more than armed vigilantes operating under police auspices.

The government has long contended that South Africa is “under-policed” and notes that it currently has only 1.7 police officers per 1,000 people, compared to 6-plus per 1,000 that most Western nations have.

While acknowledging that the diversion of police to riot duties has reduced the number available for crime prevention, the spokesman at police headquarters said that other factors, notably black unemployment, now at 60% in some areas, were probably involved in the increased crime.

“It would be an oversimplification to attribute the increase in crime solely to the unrest or to the disruption that unrest causes in our normal deployments,” the spokesman said, adding that “a number of criminal offenses are also committed under the guise of unrest.”