South Africa is an outlier for the extent to which its citizens are hunted by organised criminal gangs. These gangs surveil a target, study its vulnerabilities, and execute a planned, typically armed, assault. The victims are not incidental. They are chosen. This is what is known as predatory crime.

South Africans tend to treat crime the way they treat the weather. It is experienced privately, survived individually, and accepted collectively as something that worsens and improves according to forces no one quite understands, and no one is quite responsible for. Ask a South African about the armed robbery that happened down the road, the hijacking at the intersection, the home invasion three streets over, and almost without exception they will shrug. This is South Africa, they will say. This is just how it is.

A special report published this month by The Common Sense exposes that the predatory crime crisis gripping this country is not an inevitable feature of daily life. It has a specific history, specific causes, and specific moments at which it could have been contained and was not.

The roots of South Africa's predatory crime crisis lie in the political violence of the paramilitary structures of the liberation movements of the late 1980s and early 1990s – a period that was, effectively, a low-level civil war. The armed wings of the liberation movements recruited and trained tens of thousands of young people into armed formations, supplied them with weapons, and in some cases, explicitly sanctioned robbery as a means of operational funding.

When the 1994 election came, these structures did not demobilise. Some entered the new state security structures without vetting. Others moved into organised crime, carrying with them the weapons and training accumulated during the struggle years. What began as politically directed violence did not end with the political settlement. Rather, it adapted.

The numbers make this plain. Armed robberies stood at roughly 26 000 in 1987. By 2004, that figure had reached 134 000. By 2024 it stood at over 150 000. As per the chart below, a South African today is five times more likely to be the victim of an armed robbery in their home than they were in 1994. The trend runs in one direction only, and it begins well before the democratic transition of 1994.

So, why do South Africans accept predatory crime as an inevitable feature of their lives?

Part of the answer lies in what political scientists call the absence of common knowledge. Common knowledge is not merely individual awareness that a problem exists. It is a shared public understanding of a problem's nature, scale, and origins, broad enough and clear enough to create the political pressure for accountability. South Africa developed common knowledge about state capture. The Gupta leaks, the Zondo Commission, the years of public testimony; all these together made the architecture of corruption undeniable, and the African National Congress has paid an electoral price as a result.

Predatory crime has never undergone an equivalent reckoning. South Africans know crime is bad. They do not know where it came from, who bears responsibility for it, or that the specialist police units built to confront it were systematically dismantled in the early 2000s.

The other part of the answer is the narrative itself. For two decades, the international academic and media consensus has held that violent crime fell by half after apartheid. It is a claim repeated recently by The Guardian. And on the single metric they point to, the murder rate, the numbers do lend themselves to that reading. What that narrative never explains is that the 1993 murder peak was not produced by crime. It was produced by a low-level civil war. When the war ended, the murder rate fell. Predatory crime did not. It rose, continuously, relentlessly, and in plain sight in four decades of police statistics that nobody in the international conversation has ever properly examined.

A problem that is understood to have been solved cannot be confronted. South Africans lock their gates, pay their armed response subscriptions, and adapt their behaviour in a hundred ways that collectively represent an enormous, and largely invisible, tax on daily life. They do all of this without a shared account of why the problem exists, without political pressure on those who allowed it to grow, and without the common knowledge that would make accountability possible.

South Africa’s crime crisis is not inevitable. It has a history. And understanding that history is where any serious response must begin.

Read the full special report on South Africa's predatory crime crisis in The Common Sense.