A new special report, released by The Common Sense this week, shows that South African criminal networks do not merely prey on citizens opportunistically. They hunt them. This is what is called predatory crime: organised, deliberate, and targeted, and no subcategory illustrates its severity more clearly than armed residential robbery.

An armed residential robbery in South Africa is not a burglary that goes wrong. It is a planned, armed operation against a civilian family. The criminals surveil the property for days, sometimes weeks. They map the routines of the household. They note when people leave, when they return, whether there are dogs, whether there are guards. And then, at a chosen moment, they enter by force, armed with firearms. Residents are held at gunpoint. They are tied up, assaulted, and terrorised. Women are raped. People are killed. This is not theft. It is a violent assault on a family inside their own home.

In 2024, this happened 23 614 times. That is 65 homes invaded every single day.

The chart below tracks the number of armed home invasions since 1987. The data show that there were very few such incidents in the late 1980s, but that the number lifted towards 5 000 through the late 1980s and into the early 1990s. Thereafter there was a break in the data, which were only again published in 2003, by which stage the number had increased to near 10 000 incidents.  The number subsequently rose strongly to the current number of over 23 000.

The chart below shows that when calculated per 100 000 households, the standard measure used to account for population growth, armed residential robbery has increased fivefold since 1994.

In its full special report, The Common Sense has researched the history and origins behind this type of crime, and how it is to a significant extent tied to the low-level civil war that played out in South Africa in the decade before its transition to democracy. That report has exposed the lie that violent crime in South Africa chiefly afflicts minorities, and that overall levels of such crime reduced sharply after the democratic transition. In time The Common Sense will publish advice on what needs to be done to rein in the organised criminal gangs that terrorise South Africans in their homes.

For a full account of where South Africa’s predatory crime crisis came from and why it has never been properly confronted, read The Common Sense’s special report on South Africa's predatory crime problem.