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A new special report published this month by The Common Sense sets out to answer a question that has never been properly addressed: how did South Africa become virtually unique in the world for the extent to which its citizens are preyed on by organised criminal gangs? The report focuses on what it calls predatory crime: organised, deliberate, targeted violence against South Africans in the places they should feel safest -- their homes, their businesses, their cars. This article draws on that report to tell the story of armed robbery, the broadest measure of predatory crime, and what four decades of data reveal about a crisis that has never been honestly confronted.

An armed robbery is not a petty theft. It is a violent assault committed with a weapon, in which the victim is confronted directly and threatened with their life. It includes violent crimes like carjackings, home invasions, business robberies, and street robberies. As seen in the chart below, in 1987, approximately 26 000 such incidents were recorded in South Africa. By 1994 that figure had already reached 68 000 incidents. By 2004 it had crossed 133 000 incidents. In 2024 it stood at over 150 000 incidents. That is a fivefold increase in raw terms in just under four decades.

Adjusting for population growth does not change the picture materially. The armed robbery rate stood at 75 per 100 000 people in 1986. It peaked at 273 per 100 000 in 2004, a 3.7-fold increase from the 1986 baseline. Despite some improvement since, it still sat at 235 per 100 000 in 2024, meaning South Africans are approximately three times more likely to be the victim of an armed robbery today than they were four decades ago.

In its full special report, The Common Sense has researched the history and origins of predatory 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 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 the problem.