Crime in Pretoria. Results of a City Victim Survey

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 for filling the gaps left by official crime statistics. They present an independent source of information 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 so too are opinions of victims themselves. Information of this sort - 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,' raising the importance of victim survey information.

The Pretoria victim survey is the fourth city survey conducted by the Institute for Security Studies. Comparable surveys have been carried out in metropolitan areas of Johannesburg (July 1997), Durban (December 1997) and Cape Town (February 1998). 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?

This report was prepared for the Greater Pretoria Metropolitan Council, as part of the research process which will culminate in the development of a crime prevention strategy for the metropolitan area. In order to assist the Institute for a Democratic South Africa's (Idasa) Community Safety Unit in Pretoria to develop the strategy, this report outlines the extent and nature of crime in Pretoria, who is most at risk of particular crimes, levels of anxiety about crime, and the perceptions of victims and of the public more generally, about the police and other initiatives to support crime victims. As such, the data provide a critical balance between the reality of victimisation and public perception, which is essential for formulating targeted and successful local crime prevention strategies.