South African Police Service Annual Crime Records 2005-2025

The scope of the SAPS Annual Crime Records includes:

CONTACT CRIMES: These crimes involve the use of violence or a threat to use violence that is directed against the person of a victim. The category includes murder, attempted murder, sexual offences, assault with the intention to inflict grievous bodily harm, common assault, common robbery and robbery with aggravating circumstances (the latter divided into the subcategories of carjacking, truck hijacking, bank robbery, robbery of cash in transit, robbery at residential premises and robbery at non-residential premises).

CONTACT-RELATED CRIMES: This category includes only two crimes; arson and malicious damage to property. These are violent crimes committed against material assets with the intention to cause damage and or the destruction of another person’s property.

CRIMES AGAINST PROPERTY: These crimes occur in the absence of the victim or under circumstances in which the victim is unaware of the crime being committed at the time (no person is directly or immediately harmed or threatened during the commission of such a crime). The category includes burglary at residential premises, burglary at non-residential premises, theft of motor vehicles and motorcycles, theft out of or from motor vehicles and stock-theft.

OTHER SERIOUS CRIMES: The category includes all theft not mentioned elsewhere (common or other theft), commercial crime (fraud-related crimes) and shoplifting.

CRIMES DEPENDENT ON POLICE ACTION FOR DETECTION: These are crimes in general not reported by members of the public, but mainly detected through direct police action, such as roadblocks and SAPS intelligence-led operations. An increase in this broad category of crime usually indicates intensified police activity rather than an increased criminal activity. Crimes in this category include unlawful possession of firearms and ammunition, driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, unlawful possession of and dealing in drugs and sexual offences detected by police action (including prostitution, keeping of a brothel and pornography-related offences)

GEO-CODED DATA :
This version includes district and local municipality variables from the StatsSA Police District shapefile from Census 2022, alongside the GIS coordinate variables. These have been added to increase the utility of the the SAPS annual crime records. This means researchers can now group and compare crime records in a certain financial year by district and local municipality.