Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia on Friday said although various categories of violent crime have declined, overall levels remain unacceptably high.

In releasing the 2025/26 third quarter crime statistics, Cachalia promised that the South African Police Service (Saps) would re-invigorate community-policing by establishing a national community-patroller programme for every province.

While patrollers will not undertake any policing functions, they will be deployed to increase security presence and prevent crime, particularly in transport nodes, walkways, around schools, et cetera.

Cachalia said he tasked the Civilian Secretariat for Police to develop the concept and a funding model, with the objective of training community members and issuing them stipends to assist with improving safety in their areas.

He highlighted that after more than a decade of yearly increases, murder was on the decrease since the first quarter of 2023/24.

“…this trend has continued throughout this year with this quarter showing a 8.7 decrease, or 602 fewer lives lost,” he stated.

He said this meant that over the last two years, the numbers of murders for the third quarter period of October 1 to December 31 dropped by 17.6%, or 1 359 fewer murders.

He highlighted that total contact crimes, made up of all categories of violent crime, started to decrease in the third quarter of 2024/25.

“During this quarter, total violent crime decreased again by 6.7%, or 12 682 fewer cases reported to the Saps, when compared to the same quarter last year. Over the past two years, total violent crime for this quarter is down by 8.3%, or 15 763 fewer cases. This trend may well be attributable to enhanced policing operations,” he noted.

While most communities have recorded a decrease in violent and property crimes, Cachalia said there were still too many communities that had recorded increases.

“This does not necessarily translate into a felt sense of security by individuals, families and communities,” he said.

Of the 23 police officials who lost their lives 80% were off-duty.

Next month, Cachalia will hold a meeting of all Provincial Heads of Community Safety, including some Premiers, to ensure that Saps aligns the operations of the national, provincial and local governments in implementing the Integrated Crime and Violence Prevention Strategy in the high-crime precincts in all provinces.

“We also need to ensure that communities are supported with their local level programmes to improve public safety. However, this must be done within the law. Where communities take the law into their own hands, resulting in murders and assaults, this creates further work for an already overstretched police service,” said Cachalia.

ORGANISED CRIME

While most organised crime was not recorded in the national crime statistics, Cachalia said the impact of these crimes was real and severely damaging for the country.

He explained that the quality of crucial public services such as education, health care and transport, was undermined when the public funds allocated for these services were stolen.

“In the private sector, the cost of goods and services increase as private companies charge more to make up for losses in stock or fraud or incur additional security costs to prevent becoming victims to syndicated crime,” he explained.

He pointed out that the Madlanga Commission and related Parliamentary Ad Hoc inquiries had shown that organised criminality had infiltrated the country’s criminal justice system.

He announced that the Saps had already established a dedicated task team to investigate evidence of criminality against senior Saps and Ekurhuleni local government officials who had been identified by the interim report of the Madlanga Commission as being part of criminal activities.

CONVICTIONS

Meanwhile, Saps National Commissioner General Fannie Masemola announced that between October 1 and December 31, a total of 2 738 accused persons were convicted to time in prison.

He said 199 accused persons were sentenced to life imprisonment, including 51 murderers and 139 rapists; 15 accused persons were sentenced to 40 years and more imprisonment, including 10 murderers and two rapists.

He highlighted that 29 accused persons were sentenced to 30 years and more imprisonment, including 10 murderers.

He said 109 gender-based violence and femicide perpetrators were sentenced to life in prison.