What is driving SA’s sudden crime plunge?
The police are reporting a dramatic fall in murder and aggravated robbery. Is it real? And, if so, what explains it?
South Africa has a long, hard-earned reputation for rampant and unchecked predatory criminality. The entrenched collusion between the country’s politicians, crime bosses, and many senior police officers has also been put on stark public display at the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry into Criminality, Political Interference and Corruption in the Criminal Justice System. This has been the coup de grâce for the public’s already tenuous confidence in the country’s criminal justice system.
In this context, the latest quarterly crime statistics released by Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia have been met with some incredulity. These revealed a 9.2% (2 327) fall in the number of recorded homicides from 25 423 in 2024/25 to 23 096 in 2025/26. Even more astoundingly, the number of robberies with aggravating circumstances fell by 11.8% (16 207) from 137 306 in 2024/25 to 121 099 in 2025/26.
In News24, Jonny Steinberg noted that such falls in crime are historically unprecedented both locally and internationally. “Either the stats are wrong, or something immense is happening in the fabric of South African society.” “What is going on?” he asks. “Have the police botched the recording of crime? Or is something of great moment happening in everyday life of which we are not yet aware? Cachalia has not told us. He has not even shown he gets that these are the questions.”
Such scepticism is certainly warranted, as the criminal justice system appears to be as dysfunctional as ever. This means that improved policing can likely be written off as a factor, and many crimes are also simply not reported. Given the incentives, it also suits local police commanders if as few crimes as possible are recorded in their precincts, regardless of how many are actually committed.
However, these are long-running problems which are already baked into the baseline data. If one looks at the numbers, the dramatic fall in recorded cases of aggravated robbery appears to be a real nationwide trend, and one that is indeed explained by “something of great moment happening” in South African society. This article will explain what it is.
On the margins,much can be explained by normal trends. It should be remembered, firstly, that homicides are accounted for by several different causative factors, the predominant one being (often drunken) interpersonal conflict. Then there are mob justice killings, murders committed during robberies, and killings as the result of gang (or taxi) conflicts.
Secondly, there was a huge spike both in the number of homicides and aggravated robberies following the end of the Covid-19 lockdowns, and the July 2021 insurrection in KwaZulu-Natal and parts of Gauteng. The number of murders spiked from 19 972 in 2020/21 to 25 181 in 2021/22 before peaking at 27 419 in 2023/24. As the shock of these exogenous events wears off, there is an inevitable regression towards the structural mean. The number of recorded homicides in 2025/26 is thus down, but remains well above that recorded in 2020/21.
If one looks at the sort of social fabric crimes which drive the interpersonal homicide numbers, these are down year-on-year but not significantly. Common assault (-2.1%), assault with intent to inflict grievous bodily harm (-3.9%), and attempted murder (-0.5%) are down marginally year-on-year but remain at elevated levels historically. The number of homicides attributable to arguments/misunderstandings is down to 3 881 from 4,556 in 2024/25 but are still at about the same level (3 890) as in 2022/23. The number of homicides attributed to gang conflict has, in fact, increased from 1 025 in 2024/25 to 1 150 in 2025/26. This likely explains why the Western Cape was the one province which saw no meaningful decline in the number of murders between 2024/25 (4 467) and 2025/26 (4 448).
What, though, of aggravated robbery?
Here, the declines are genuinely striking, though there is also an element of a regression towards the mean as well. The number of aggravated robberies jumped from 119 841 in 2020/21 to 150 187 in 2023/24. In that same period, the numbers of murders linked to recorded robberies increased from 1 095 in 2020/21 to 1 511 in 2024/25, and robbery-linked attempted murders from 2 337 to 3 719.
At 121 099 recorded cases in 2025/26, the aggravated robbery numbers are now back to what they were in 2020/21. At 17 464 cases in 2025/26, the number of carjackings is back to just above what they were in 2020/21 (16 731). Equally, residential robberies – the most feared crime type up until recently – are down to 20 420 in 2025/26, about the same number as in 2020/21 (20 870). The carjacking and residential robbery trends can be explained in part by the increasing sophistication of private security, and particularly the roll out of CCTV and car number plate recognition technology in areas that can afford it.
However, the really dramatic decline can be found in the fall in the number of bank and cash-in-transit robberies as well as business robberies. The 128 CIT and bank robbery cases recorded in 2025/2026 are almost half the 242 cases recorded in 2022/23. The number of business robberies have fallen from 20 007 to 11 656 in the same period. The numbers are lower even than the 13 885 cases recorded in 2008/9. Robbery-related murders fell to 1 189 in 2025/26 from 1 496 the year before, with robbery-related attempted murders falling to 2 794 from 3 614.
To understand what is driving down these numbers, one must look at the figures for two other crime categories. The number of commercial crimes reported is up from 82 890 in 2020/21 to 147 230 in 2025/26 and continues to trend upwards. Kidnappings meanwhile rose from 18 151 in 2024/25 to 18 491 in 2025/26. They are up from 6 036 cases recorded in 2020/21, a threefold increase. The vast majority of these are “express kidnappings” – rather than ransom kidnappings – whereby the victims are held at gunpoint until the criminals have emptied out their bank accounts using their electronic devices.
What is clearly driving business robberies down, and express kidnappings upwards, is the “something immense” that is happening in South African society, and that is the dramatic shift over the past few years to a cashless economy. Businesses and banks are no longer being robbed, in other words, because that is no longer where the money is.
