Household burglaries are one of the most common crimes reported in South Africa.
In 2019 an average of 17,500 burglaries a month were reported to the police.
Then Covid-19 struck and crime plummeted thanks to lockdown restrictions, which started on 26 March 2020, when people were all but confined to their homes for a month.
A burglary happens when people aren’t at home or when they’re asleep , according to the South African Police Service’s definition. Burglars target appliances, jewellery, cash, TVs, cell phones, laptops and groceries.
But even after the government eased lockdown restrictions from around the end of September 2021, the number of burglaries reported to the police has remained below pre-Covid numbers.
For example, the average number of burglaries reported per month for the first six months of 2022 is 13,429, which is about 4,000 fewer than the monthly average in 2019.
What’s behind the decrease?
There are a couple of potential reasons. It could be that fewer burglaries are being committed or it may be because fewer people are reporting residential burglaries to the police.
There has been a decrease in residential burglaries particularly in urban areas since 1994, but researchers haven’t dug into the reasons for the decline, said senior researcher and project manager Lizette Lancaster from the Institute of Security Studies – a non-profit focusing on training and research in crime prevention, criminal justice and conflict.
According to Lancaster, the underreporting of burglaries to the police is because people often think the crime was small and not worth the effort of filing a police report.
About three out of five burglaries are reported to the police, according to an annual national survey conducted by Stats SA, which asks 33,000 households about their experience of crime with questions like: did a person experience crime in the last 12 months and whether they or a member of their household reported the incidents to the police.
People with insurance who need to claim money back for stolen items are more likely to report burglaries, according to the Institute for Security Studies. And in some cases, residents believe that reporting a crime will improve their community’s safety, wrote Ithandile Mbewu, Emeka E Obioha and Ishmael Mugari in an article for Cogent Social Sciences.
What was crime like in your area? Find your station
Stations with the most burglaries
In 2019, a total of 210,411 residential burglaries were reported at police stations across the country. The number dropped by 19% in 2020 and by another 9% in 2021.
In the first six months of 2022, there were 80,573 reported burglaries, so it looks unlikely that burglaries will return to pre-Covid levels by the end of the year.
At two-thirds of South Africa’s 1,161 police stations the number of burglaries reported in 2022 was lower than 2019.
Even the hot spots – the 10 precincts with the highest number of residential burglary cases in 2019 – saw a decrease.
In 2022, Witbank, Park Road and Honeydew, the three police stations that reported the most home burglaries in 2019, all reported fewer burglaries.
Witbank police station is in Emalahleni – previously known as Witbank – a coal-mining town in Mpumalanga. It had the highest number of reported burglaries in the country in 2019 (1,264 a year, 105 a month) and the second highest in 2018 (1,389 a year, 116 a month).
One of the reasons police believe the Witbank precinct is an attractive spot for burglars is its proximity to the N4 highway, which runs between Emalahleni and Tshwane, which makes for easy access and a quick escape.
Since 2021, reported burglaries had dropped to an average of 60 cases a month and have remained there.
Honeydew, a suburb in the north of Johannesburg, which, like Witbank, is near a busy highway, had the second-highest number of cases at an average of 105 a month (1,259 a year).
But in 2020 and 2021 Honeydew was no longer even on the top 10 list; its reported burglaries had nearly halved to an average of 54 in 2021 and increased only slightly to 57 a month in 2022.
Park Road police station in central Bloemfontein has the dubious distinction of twice having the most reported home burglaries in a month since 2018, with 145 cases in March and December 2018.
It’s been in the top 10 list of police stations for residential burglaries every year since 2018, although the average number of cases per month have been decreasing since 2019, from 96 to 76 in 2022.
Stations where crime has increased since 2019
Three precincts – Ikageng, Cambridge and Phoenix – showed an increase in burglaries in 2021 and 2022, enough to move into the top 10.
Ikageng, a township outside Potchefstroom, reported the third-highest average monthly burglary cases in 2022 (62).
Cambridge, a precinct in Buffalo City, saw an increase from an average of 53 a month in 2019 to 61 a month in 2022.
Phoenix, a suburb of Durban, reported a slight increase in burglaries from an average 54 a month in 2019 to 58 in 2022, enough to make it the 10th-highest in 2022 so far.
Are household robberies down too?
Robberies occur when a person is at home, according to the crime stats definition. Robbery remains one of the most feared crimes, according to the SAPS, “because the victims are unaware of whether the intention of the perpetrators is only to rob them or also to cause them physical harm”.
Robberies dropped sharply during the lockdown restrictions in early 2020, although they did rise as restrictions eased and they peaked in August.
In 2021, there were 21,766 residential robberies, 197 more than in 2019 (21,569).
The three precincts with the most residential robberies in 2019 – Honeydew, Diepsloot, and Sandton – reported a decrease in cases in 2022. Police stations in KwaZulu-Natal – Plessislaer, Inanda and Kwadukuza – have taken the top three places in 2022.
The increase in residential robberies in KwaZulu-Natal could be connected to more gangs operating in the province, said Lancaster.
