Joburg crime stats: Is law enforcement improving or are residents losing faith in police?

As Johannesburg starts its typically high-crime festive season, residents can take some reassurance from the fact that the city’s annual crime rates have been trending downward.

A decline in robberies and house burglaries over the past few years suggests that public and private law enforcement efforts have either become more effective, or more worryingly, that fewer victims are reporting crimes.

Joburgers locking up and heading out of town this month may rest easier knowing that housebreakings are down in all the top five hot spots around the city. Between the 2021/22 and 2024/25 financial years, Roodepoort’s Honeydew police station saw the biggest drop of 29% in reported burglaries. Protea Glen reported a 24% drop. Other hotspots that have shown improvement include the Protea, Moroka and Sandton precincts.

In Gauteng, common robberies without weapons, like handbag snatchings and phone thefts, have fallen from a reported 50 to 38 cases a day in the last decade.

Over the course of a year, Johannesburg SAPS reported small drops in residential robberies per day (nine to eight) with non-residential robberies dipping slightly from six to five a day. Robberies at residential and non-residential premises usually involve weapons and the use of force or violence, in about 70% of cases a gun was used. 

Crime in Joburg continues to be woefully under-reported. Statistics South Africa’s 2024/25 Governance, Public Safety, and Justice Survey revealed that only about half of households that were targeted by home invaders reported the incidents to the police. Reporting rates are even lower for crimes in public. Stats SA reported that just a third of street robberies were reported to the SAPS.

The improvements in crime stats could also be linked to the impact of security measures like private security guards, surveillance cameras and fencing. 

According to the Private Security Regulatory Authority (PSIRA), the number of registered private security businesses in Gauteng grew from 4,026 in 2019 to 6,386 last year. About 34% of all active, registered security guards nationally are in Gauteng. In 2023, PSIRA reported that private security guards outnumbered the number of police officers in South Africa by four to one.
-ends-

• This story is produced by Our City News, a non-profit newsroom that serves the people of Johannesburg.