There is good news on that eternal South African bugaboo, crime. The country’s police minister, Minister Nathi Mthethwa, has announced that South Africa’s murder rate — perennially one of the worst in the world — fell by 6.5% in the period from March 2010 to April 2011. In that same time span the number of house robberies declined by 10%. All is not good news, as the number of reported rapes rose slightly, though Mthethwa hinted that this may be a function of higher rates of reporting rather than more incidents.
On the whole this is an incredibly positive report. And one question I have that we may never know the answer to is whether or no the increase in policing as a result of the World Cup played any role in these statistics. Despite impressions to the contrary, many forms of crime, including murder, have actually been dropping steadily if too slowly since 1994. But the latest figures are really quite a positive sign, and given that the majority of the 40,000 new police officers hired and trained for the World Cup were to be kept on after the event, one cannot help but wonder if at least some proportion of these improved numbers are the result of greater police presence.