Comparing crime in south Africa's major cities: Results of four city victim surveys

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By Antoinette Louw Institute for Security Studies

Published in African Security Review Vol 8 No 1, 1999

Over the past year, the Institute for Security Studies has conducted the country’s first city victim surveys.¹ In total, 13 600 people were interviewed in Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town and Pretoria. Aiming to establish the true extent of crime, people were asked about crime that happened to them, including those incidents not reported to the police. They were also questioned about how the incidents happened, how they responded, how safe they feel, their views on the police and on what should be done to reduce crime.

Victim surveys have been conducted across the world for the past thirty years as a means of supplementing police statistics on crime. Information about crime, given a range of factors, is not always accessible or accurate. Compiling official statistics depends on both the public to report crime and the police to record the details once they do. But the nature of criminal events themselves often mitigates against reporting. Some incidents are not regarded as significant enough to warrant the effort; others are too sensitive to disclose details to strangers behind a desk in a police charge office.

Since reducing crime requires an understanding of the extent and nature of the problem, accurate information is critical. Victim surveys are the most important source of information to fill the gaps left by official crime statistics. They present an independent source about crime based on questions asked of a representative sample of the population in a specific geographic area. As such, these surveys record the experience of crime from the unique perspective of the victim: not only are crimes which are not recorded by the police captured in the survey, but also the opinions of victims themselves. Information of this kind — which is critical for crime prevention — is limited in official records, since the criminal justice process requires the collation of the offender’s rather than the victim’s details.

The inadequacies of police crime information are a reality in most societies. In South Africa, particular problems — relating to poor police-community relations, as well as more technical issues of data integrity and accessibility — exacerbate the situation,² raising the importance of victim survey information. In the case of both the Johannesburg and Pretoria surveys, the results have been channelled directly into initiatives of the respective metropolitan councils to develop local crime prevention strategies.³ One key example is the Greater Johannesburg: Safer Cities initiative, which drew heavily on the Johannesburg victim survey data, and is currently being implemented in the city.

Victim surveys provide several types of information which are key to the understanding of crime and to developing localised responses to crime reduction:

Determining the extent of crime: Survey data reflect those crimes that are not recorded by the police. Conducted at regular intervals over an extended period of time, this enables an assessment of the extent to which changes in crime levels — as recorded by the police — are real or a function of changing reporting tendencies.



Identifying who is most at risk of particular crimes: Because victim surveys gather information from both victims and non-victims from a representative sample of the population in any area, the data can be used to determine whether particular people are more at risk of victimisation than others. This information (which cannot be obtained from police statistics) is essential to enable the prioritisation of particular crime categories and vulnerable groups for attention.



Understanding the nature of particular crime types, especially those that are poorly recorded in official crime statistics: Victim surveys provide useful details (which are difficult to glean from the South African Police Service (SAPS) databases) on where and when crimes are the most likely to occur, and circumstances which characterise certain crimes. Examples include the relationship between victim and offender, weapons used and degree of violence and injury sustained, association with drugs and alcohol, and what the victim was doing when the crime occurred. This information is particularly relevant for crimes such as mugging and assault, which are seldom reported to the police.



Measuring levels of anxiety about crime: Feelings of insecurity have social, economic and political consequences for society. By recording the perceptions of both victims and non-victims, and asking specific questions about fear, the surveys illustrate the extent and nature of fear of crime.



Determining public perceptions of police effectiveness and service delivery: Victim surveys provide useful mechanisms for recording the opinions of the public, and more importantly, the opinions of those people that have had contact with the police about their performance.



Establishing the opinions of victims and others about appropriate interventions: Crime prevention and victim support are relatively new fields in South Africa. Accurate information about what victims would prefer in this regard, is thus particularly relevant.

These strengths have been recognised for some time abroad, and the surveys used in the four cities are based on a questionnaire similar to that used by the International Crime Victims Survey (ICVS) in more than fifty countries. The city surveys conducted by the ISS, however, differ from this model in their application as street surveys rather than household surveys.

While the city surveys provide invaluable information about the crime situation in particular localities, certain limitations which relate to the street survey methodology, as well as to victim surveys in general, should be acknowledged.

Street surveys present more problems for comparability with other types of surveys than with the accuracy of the data per se. Interviewing people on the street may result in higher crime counts, since those who are particularly active (and thus more likely to be the victims of certain crimes) are more likely to be interviewed.

On the other hand, street surveys (and even household surveys) are also likely to undercount crimes such as sexual assault. This is a result of the sensitivity around discussing these incidents in public, as well as confusion over terminology and legal definitions of particular crimes. There is also a chance that stereotyping of particular incidents can occur during the course of the survey, which narrows the scope of responses.⁴ Incidents in which the victim and offender know one another are also undercounted in victim surveys, since respondents may not perceive these as ‘real crimes’ and may also be reluctant to disclose such details to interviewers.⁵ Thus, the extent of domestic or ‘non-stranger’ violence would be affected.

Burglary is another crime type which has the potential to be misrepresented by street victim surveys. According to the sampling frame, representative categories of respondents are interviewed in public places across the city. However, since people are chosen on the street and not in their homes (as is the case in household surveys), it is impossible to control where selected respondents actually live. While the sample may target a representative number of people in the streets of the inner city, for example, the number who actually reside in the inner city may vary from the target sample. The implications are the most serious for burglary, since this is the one crime type that is directly associated with the victim’s home. The problem is much less serious for other crimes, since mugging, assault and car theft, for example, depend largely on where and when people work, shop and engage in recreation, and not only on where they live.

Other types of victimisation are also not well reflected in the city victim surveys. Because parental consent is required to survey children, crimes committed against people under eighteen years are not recorded. Specialised surveys have been conducted in recent years to cover the experiences of these and other groups, such as women, tourists and businesses.

Limitations arising from people’s ability to recall experiences of crime have been noted in methodological studies of large-scale victimisation surveys carried out in the United States and the United Kingdom. These have found that respondents may make up an offence; not realise that an incident constitutes one of the offences covered in the survey; incorrectly remember when the event happened; or forget a relevant incident altogether.⁶

Studies of methodological limitations related to memory generally conclude that the biases in the data result in an undercount of crime (rather than an overcount as is often suspected).⁷ Trivial crimes (such as minor thefts and vandalism) are the most likely to be forgotten in an interview, while more serious crimes are usually well remembered and may even be overcounted, as more important events tend to be "pulled forward in time."⁸ This is relevant to the ISS city victim surveys, which sought information on a selection of serious crimes, and is probably one of the reasons for the high murder rates recorded by the city surveys. This is one example of why comparisons between victim surveys and police statistics should be approached with caution.

In each of the metropolitan areas, representative samples of people were surveyed. The dates and sample sizes in each case were:

Johannesburg: July 1997 — 1 266 respondents

Durban: December 1997 — 1 884 respondents

Cape Town: February 1998 — 5 839 respondents

Pretoria: April 1998 — 4 611 respondents

The interviews, conducted by DRA Development, took place in the street. People were selected according to a predetermined race, age and gender profile, in accordance with the demographic profile of each metropolitan area. Interviews were spread among suburbs, townships, informal settlements and the inner city.

The results below represent the findings of a preliminary comparative analysis of crime trends in the four metropolitan areas. The Institute will publish a more detailed comparison in the near future.

The survey results confirm that Johannesburg has the highest incidence of crime: 62 per cent of all people were victims in the city, compared with 59 per cent in Durban, 54,6 per cent in Pretoria and 49,5 per cent in Cape Town (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Overall victimisation levels

However, since the periods covered by each survey vary slightly, one-year trends are more accurate (Figure 2). These reveal that, in 1996, the incidence of particular crimes was in fact slightly higher in Durban than in Johannesburg: in Durban, 7,4 per cent and 7,5 per cent of people experienced a burglary and robbery, respectively — higher than the seven per cent and six per cent of people in Johannesburg for the same crimes. The data suggest that, although Johannesburg has the most crime overall, the extent and nature of crime in Durban are not unlike that in Johannesburg — something which police statistics do not reflect.

The one-year comparisons of crime levels in 1996 also reveal that crime levels are in fact lower in Pretoria than in Cape Town, making the former city the most safe of all the country’s major metropolitan areas.

In all four metropolitan areas, burglary is the most common crime, followed by robbery (‘robbery’ in this case refers mostly to mugging). In Johannesburg and Durban, assault is the third most common crime. In Cape Town and Pretoria by comparison, car theft is the third most common offence. This suggests that Johannesburg and Durban have higher levels of crimes that involve violence than the other two cities: these include robbery, assault and car hijacking (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Proportion of people who were victims of crime in 1996

How the risk of becoming a victim varies

The risk of victimisation varies between the metropolitan areas and within each of the cities (Figure 3). Race categorisations are used in this analysis because these indicate the clearest differences in crime patterns. However, it is not race per se that influences victimisation, but instead, where people live and work, and often their socio-economic status. In most South African cities, race still distinguishes these factors.

Figure 3: Risk of (all) crime for different race groups

For African people, the most dangerous city of the four is Durban. Here, 66,3 per cent of Africans surveyed were crime victims, compared with 59,2 per cent of those Africans surveyed in Johannesburg. Indeed, the survey indicates that Johannesburg is probably the safest city for African people.

For white people, this pattern is reversed. In their case, Johannesburg is the city where they are the most likely to be victimised, while Durban is the safest. The same trend applies for Asian people. Coloured people are the safest in Pretoria, and the most likely to experience crime in Johannesburg.

In sum, these trends suggest that the chances of becoming a victim are the highest in Johannesburg for all people except Africans.

Survey data also show that the risk of becoming a victim varies according to crime types and to where people live. In all the cities, crimes aimed at property tend to affect those people living in the suburbs more than those resident in other parts of the city. This applies, in particular, to car theft. By contrast, the incidence of violent crimes, notably car hijacking, assault, sexual assault and murder, is the highest in townships and informal settlements.

Fear of crime is high throughout the country, with over forty per cent of people in each city saying that they feel very unsafe at night in the areas where they live. Although there are variations in the levels of fear and in what people fear, patterns generally reflect who is most at risk of becoming a victim.

In Johannesburg, 65,2 per cent of people said they felt very unsafe at night — the highest levels of anxiety recorded of the four cities — and a trend that is not surprising, given that the city has the highest crime levels (Figure 4). People in Durban and Cape Town feel less insecure: 42,5 per cent and 41 per cent, respectively, felt very unsafe. Comparisons with levels of fear in other countries reveal that fear of crime is higher in South African cities than in cities of several developing countries surveyed by the International Crime Victims Survey (ICVS). The ICVS found that around thirty per cent of those surveyed, said they felt very unsafe. Fear of crime in developed countries is even lower.

Figure 4: How safe people feel alone in their areas of residence at night

Not all South Africans experience the same levels of fear associated with crime, however. The survey data show that those who are the most at risk tend to be the most fearful. In Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town, those most likely to feel very unsafe at night were African, Asian and coloured people (Figure 5). In Johannesburg for example, 84 per cent of coloureds, 69 per cent of Asians and 66 per cent of Africans were particularly fearful, compared with 56,5 per cent of white people. Similarly, in Cape Town, 52,5 per cent of coloureds and fifty per cent of Africans said they were very afraid, compared with only sixteen per cent of white city residents.

Figure 5: Proportion of people who feel very unsafe in their areas of residence at night

Durban is the only exception to this trend, where fifty per cent of both white and African people felt very unsafe. This is one of the few cases in which fear of crime does not match the likelihood of victimisation: white people in Durban are in fact the least likely of all the city’s residents to become victims of crime.

Anxiety about crime, even when it does not match the risk of victimisation, needs to be taken seriously by the government and those concerned with crime reduction. It has social, economic and political costs, which not only threaten the stability of the economy and the democracy, but could also hinder crime prevention efforts. For those people — the majority of crime victims — who cannot afford to move in an attempt to avoid crime, the response is likely to be a withdrawal from the community. Fear of crime encourages people to barricade themselves in their homes and to restrict their movements and social activities. This could threaten attempts to encourage community involvement in local crime prevention efforts and community policing.

Perceptions of the police are poor in all four cities: less than 37 per cent of people thought the police were doing a good job at controlling crime. People in Pretoria were the most complimentary about police performance: 37 per cent approved of police activity, compared with 34 per cent in Johannesburg, 33 per cent in Durban and only thirty per cent in Cape Town. Indeed, the survey data show that perceptions of the police are consistently the poorest among Capetonians.

Views of police performance, however, do vary among the inhabitants within each city. White people tend to be more satisfied with police service delivery than any others. In Durban, for example, 45 per cent of whites thought the police were doing a good job, compared with only twelve per cent of coloureds and 17,5 per cent of Africans. Similar trends are evident in the other metropolitan areas. The data suggest that policing is still uneven in South Africa’s urban areas: people living in former ‘white’ parts of the city benefit from better police infrastructure and services than do their counterparts in the townships and informal settlements.

The reasons given by respondents for these poor views of police performance largely centred on the ineffectiveness of the police in conducting ordinary police activities. Although trends were generally similar across the cities, more people in Johannesburg than anywhere else said that the police were corrupt (twenty per cent compared with less than ten per cent in the other metropolitan centres). In Cape Town, the most common complaint after ineffectiveness, was that the police were too slow in responding to calls: 26 per cent of people here noted this, compared with eighteen per cent in Pretoria, sixteen per cent in Durban and only seven per cent in Johannesburg. In Johannesburg, people were concerned that the police treated victims badly: 21 per cent of people raised this issue in the city, compared with seventeen per cent in Durban and eleven per cent in Cape Town.

Public perceptions about how the government and individuals can make the city safer are not unrealistic, given the high levels of crime and fear of crime. In all four cities, the majority of people called for more and better police, followed by harsher penalties and, finally, development and employment.

The focus on policing (despite the low levels of confidence in the police) probably reflects people’s perceptions that the problem needs urgent attention: when asked what should be done other than policing, most people in all four cities said employment was key. This suggests that people do understand what the root causes are of crime.

Policing was clearly a priority for people in those places with the highest crime levels: in Johannesburg and Durban, 65 per cent and 55,5 per cent of people, respectively, thought policing was the key (Figure 6). Fewer people in Cape Town (49 per cent) and Pretoria (47 per cent) said the same. Those cities in which people were the most likely to ask for development and employment — Durban and Cape Town — are also the two cities with the largest number of informal settlements, which may explain these views.

Figure 6: What the government should do to make the city safer

Significantly, few people thought the death penalty or vigilante action would reduce crime. This was even the case in Cape Town, where People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad) has come to represent one type of community response to crime. When asked what they could do to reduce crime, a surprising number of people — given that confidence in the police is low — said they were prepared to work with the police. This view was the most common in Pretoria, where 34 per cent of people said that co-operation with the police would reduce crime. In Durban, 25 per cent responded in the same way, while in Cape Town (where perceptions of the police are poorest), only nineteen per cent of people said they wanted to work with the police.

Respondents also said that they could take precautions and be more alert, and that participating in local safety initiatives or community policing activities would help. Significantly, 66 per cent of people in Cape Town said the latter would make the city safer (compared with only 25 per cent in Durban and 24 per cent in Pretoria). Such community activity does not include vigilante-type action, but rather participation in more established local safety projects. It is likely, given the low levels of confidence in the police, as well as the heightened awareness about community-based actions around crime (perhaps in the wake of Pagad’s activities), that people in Cape Town are more receptive than in the other cities to non-state, locally driven activities aimed at reducing crime.