How We Present Crime Data

Raw crime counts are not adjusted for population

All crime figures are raw reported counts as published by SAPS — they are not divided by population. This means precincts serving larger residential areas will naturally report more crimes than smaller ones. A precinct like Khayelitsha, which covers a very large population, will have high absolute crime counts even if the rate per resident is similar to smaller precincts.

Use raw counts to understand the scale of crime in an area. Use the change vs prior year to understand whether crime is changing. Do not compare raw counts across precincts of different sizes without this context.

Precinct-level data only

SAPS publishes crime statistics at police precinct (station) level — the lowest geographic level available. There is no official suburb-level crime data in South Africa. A single precinct typically covers multiple suburbs, so all suburbs served by the same police station share identical crime statistics.

This means crime data for a quiet residential suburb may include incidents from a neighbouring commercial or high-traffic area within the same precinct. We make this clear on every suburb page.

Trend classification thresholds

Trend labels (vs prior year and baseline) use a ±2% threshold to avoid labelling normal fluctuation as meaningful change:

This threshold applies to both the vs-prior-year comparison and the pre-COVID baseline comparison. Small precincts with low crime counts may show large percentage swings from minor fluctuations — the threshold helps filter out noise.

When we do not show a percentage change

Where a precinct recorded fewer than 50 crimes in the prior financial year, we show the direction of change and the underlying counts, but not a percentage. On a very small base a percentage describes arithmetic rather than crime: a precinct going from 1 reported crime to 196 is a genuine increase, but expressing it as "+19,500%" implies a precision the figure does not carry.

This affects 45 of 1,169 precincts. The counts themselves are always shown, so nothing is hidden — you can compare the two years directly. Percentages are shown normally for every precinct at or above that prior-year threshold.

Raw counts and per-capita rates

SafeSuburb displays raw crime counts as published by SAPS on all precinct pages. Per-capita rates (crimes per 100,000 population) are shown on the Insights page for the 63 City of Cape Town precincts where precinct-level Census 2022 population data is available. For all other precincts across all provinces, only municipal-level population data exists (shared across multiple precincts within the same municipality), which is not precise enough for meaningful per-capita comparisons between different precincts.

Precincts serving larger populations will naturally show higher raw crime counts. A higher count does not necessarily mean an area is more dangerous — it may simply have more people. Trends vs prior year and 5-year baseline comparisons are more reliable indicators, as these compare a precinct against its own history.

Reported crime only

SAPS data reflects crimes reported to police. Crime reporting rates vary significantly by area. Under-reporting is common in many communities, meaning the true crime picture may differ from what the statistics show.

Stats SA's Governance, Public Safety and Justice Survey (GPSJS) measures how much crime goes unreported, by crime type: from 31% for theft of personal property up to 100% for murder in the 2024/25 survey. See how much crime goes unreported for the full breakdown. SafeSuburb does not apply this or any other adjustment to the SAPS figures shown on the site; they remain raw reported counts throughout.

Data coverage

Our data spans 13 complete financial years (2013-2014 through 2025-2026), drawn from two SAPS publication types:

Category counts above exclude the six robbery sub-types that SAPS reports both individually and within Robbery with aggravating circumstances (see "How aggravated robbery is counted" below). The five categories the annual publication does not carry are Culpable homicide, Public violence, Crimen injuria, Neglect and ill-treatment of children and Abduction; they are not published in the annual station-level dataset, so figures for them begin with our quarterly coverage in 2019/20 rather than indicating any change by SAPS. Together they account for about 2% of national totals. Where SAPS has not yet published all quarters for a financial year, totals cover only the available quarters. Comparisons vs prior year annualize both years (scaling totals by 4 / quarters available) to produce comparable full-year estimates. Charts and stat cards clearly label incomplete years.

Population data — two levels of accuracy

Per-capita crime rates require population data. We use two different official Census 2022 sources:

Per-capita rates are not displayed on individual precinct pages because only 63 out of over 1,150 precincts have accurate precinct-level population data. Per-capita analysis is available on the Western Cape Insights page, scoped to the 63 City of Cape Town precincts. Neither source accounts for population changes since 2022, daytime populations, or seasonal shifts in tourist areas. Municipal population figures were sourced from citypopulation.de (aggregating Stats SA Census 2022 data).

Suburb-to-precinct mapping

Our suburb-to-precinct mapping was originally compiled from community sources — Community Policing Forum websites, municipal GIS portals and SAPS documentation. Since August 2026 it is checked against the official SAPS station catchment polygons published at saps.gov.za/services/boundary.php. 2,436 suburbs are now boundary-confirmed — their location falls inside the catchment of the station we publish them under — and 59 were corrected where it did not (see the corrections logged below). A further 344 suburbs have no official coordinates we could obtain, so the question cannot be asked of them; they are reported as unverified rather than assumed correct. The remainder are flagged for review: a boundary disagreement is a candidate, not proof of error — the same suburb name often appears in several places, and our review list runs at roughly 75% precision, so each row is corroborated against a second official dataset before anything is changed. We welcome corrections — email us at [email protected].

Where new suburb pages come from. Since August 2026 we also add suburbs the other way round — starting from official geography rather than from a community source. Statistics South Africa's Census 2011 sub-place layer is the most recent official, name-bearing, suburb-level map of South Africa that the state publishes; Census 2022 sub-place geography has not been released. Where a sub-place lies inside a single SAPS station catchment — both by area and at its own representative point — the place and the station are known without inference, so the page can be created directly. 500 KwaZulu-Natal suburb pages were created this way on 9 August 2026. They are marked boundary-derived in our published provenance data, which is a stronger claim than most of the catalogue carries, not a weaker one: nobody guessed at them. Sub-places that straddle two stations, that duplicate a place we already publish, or that sit anywhere a police station exists in the crime data but not yet in the boundary map, were all excluded rather than approximated.

Station renaming: SAPS has recently renamed many police stations across the country (e.g. Grahamstown to Makhanda, Queenstown to Komani, Aliwal North to Maletswai). We map suburbs to the current official SAPS station names as they appear in quarterly crime statistics releases. Some stations have limited suburb coverage in our data — particularly in the Eastern Cape — because the renaming makes it harder to match historical mapping data to current station names.

Coverage: Suburb coverage varies by province. City of Cape Town precincts have the most detailed suburb mappings (5-15 suburbs per precinct). Rural and recently renamed stations may only show the station name itself as a single suburb. In all cases, the underlying crime data for the precinct is complete — only the suburb name mapping may be limited.

Excluded stations

Each SAPS quarterly release lists a small number of stations SafeSuburb does not publish a page for. As of the 2025/26 data that is 31 stations, in two groups. Twenty-four are pre-rename names. When SAPS renames a station it keeps reporting the old name as a separate row. We publish only the current name — Grahamstown appears as Makhanda, Queenstown as Komani, Uitenhage as Kariega — so the old name gets no page of its own. Their figures are not discarded: the pre-rename years are merged onto the current station, as described above. Excluding the old row prevents the same station being counted twice. Seven are genuinely excluded from every site-wide figure — volume tiers, trends, medians, category totals and all pages. Four report no crime at all in any quarter (Koopmansfontein, Tafalehashe, Weza, and Katkop, an Eastern Cape record with no data under that name since 2023/24); Dingleton is a ghost town demolished for mine expansion; and two are ports of entry serving no residential population, covered immediately below.

Renamed stations — full history restored. When SAPS renames a station it reports the old and new names as separate rows, and the earlier years sit under the old name. Those years are now merged onto the current station, so a renamed precinct shows its complete record rather than starting at the rename date. Makhanda, for example, now shows all 13 financial years from 2013/14, including the years recorded as "Grahamstown". This covers 24 stations. Twenty were verified against gazette or press records; four more — East London as Kugompo, Graaff-Reinet as Robert Sobukwe, Aberdeen as Xamdeboo and Barkly East as Ekhephinit — were confirmed from the figures themselves, because SAPS republishes the earlier quarters under the new name and the two match exactly where they overlap. See the corrections logged below. Where a year exists under both names, the current station's own figure is kept.

Ports of entry. We also exclude dedicated port-of-entry stations that serve no residential population — chiefly King Shaka International Airport and Maydon Wharf (Durban harbour). Because SafeSuburb is about the areas people live in, crime recorded at an airport or harbour terminal would be misleading in a residential-safety context. This means our national totals sit about 0.03% below SAPS's all-stations national figure (roughly 528 of ~1.85 million reported crimes for Apr 2025–Mar 2026). The figure most often quoted — the national murder count — is unaffected (these stations recorded no murders). Note: OR Tambo International Airport is included, because its precinct also serves real residential suburbs (e.g. Bonaero Park). The same exclusion applies to the interactive crime map — its national tallies are independently verified against SAPS's raw published figures and sit a few dozen crimes below SAPS's own national total per category. The gap is mostly theft, not drug crime: summed across the two stations for Apr 2025–Mar 2026, All theft not mentioned elsewhere (about 33%) and Theft out of or from motor vehicle (about 20%) together make up more than half of it, with Commercial crime third (about 15%) and drug-related crime fourth (about 8%).

Every site-wide computed figure — volume tiers, trends, medians, and aggregate totals — is calculated over the 1,169 precincts SafeSuburb publishes as of the 2025/26 data, not the full SAPS station list. This keeps every ranking and comparison scoped to areas you can actually look up on this site.

Additionally, some stations show extreme jumps vs the prior year (>200%) in their first years of data because they were newly established or had boundary changes. These stations are included on the site but their early-year data should be interpreted with caution: Kamhlushwa and Phola (Mpumalanga), Mokopane (Limpopo, renamed from Potgietersrus), Mareetsane (North West), Makhaza and Samora Machel (Western Cape).

How aggravated robbery is counted

SAPS publishes Carjacking, Truck hijacking, Cash-in-transit robbery, Bank robbery, and robbery at residential and non-residential premises both as standalone figures and as components of the headline Robbery with aggravating circumstances category. To avoid double-counting, every total, trend and comparison on this site uses Robbery with aggravating circumstances as a single category. The sub-types are never added on top of it.

Precinct pages show these six sub-types as an indented breakdown directly under the aggravated-robbery row, for the financial years SAPS reports them (currently every year we publish, 2013-2014 onward). This lets you see, for example, how many of a precinct's reported aggravated robberies were carjackings, without changing what counts toward the total. The six sub-types will not sum to the aggravated-robbery figure above them: that category also includes street and other aggravated robbery that SAPS does not sub-classify, so the components are always a partial view of the whole. The Hijacking page aggregates carjacking, truck hijacking and cash-in-transit robbery nationally and per province; kidnapping and murder-rate have their own dedicated pages too, linked from Crime by category.

Murder rate per 100,000 (national and province only)

Every other page on this site shows raw crime counts, with no population adjustment. The one exception is the Murder rate page, which shows murders per 100,000 people at national and province level. Rate = SAPS murders in the latest complete financial year, divided by the population estimate for that area, times 100,000. Populations come from the Stats SA Ward-level Small Area Population Estimates 2022 (published November 2025), summed up from ward level to national and province totals. The multi-year rate trend on that page holds population at this same 2022 estimate for every year shown, because no matching official estimate exists for other years. Rates for years far from 2022 are therefore approximate, more so the further back they go.

Why not a rate per precinct? We tested allocating the same ward-level population data down to individual SAPS precincts, area-weighted by the overlap between ward and precinct boundaries, then checked the result against the 63 City of Cape Town precincts that do have real precinct-level Census 2022 population. Against a pre-registered accuracy gate of 10%, the allocation missed by a median of 13.45% (worst case 685.4%, at Table Bay Harbour). The error traces to the allocation's uniform-density assumption: it works well for precincts that sit fully inside one or two wards, but fails where a precinct shares a ward with a mountain, harbour or other largely uninhabited area. Because the method failed its own gate, we did not wire it into the site. Precinct and suburb pages continue to show raw counts only, with no per-capita rate, until a precinct-level population source clears that bar.

How the suburbs-ranked pages rank

City ranking pages such as Cape Town suburbs ranked answer a question people actually search, but they do not rank suburbs as safe or unsafe. Each page contains four factual rankings: most improved and fastest rising order precincts by their five-year change in total recorded crime, and lowest and highest recorded volume order them by raw counts in the latest complete financial year, shown together with the province-relative volume tier. Where a page title poses a question like "safest suburbs?", the question is the search query, and the page answers it with these recorded-crime rankings and their limits, not with a safety verdict.

The usual caveats apply with full force on ranking pages, because ranking amplifies them: raw counts are not population-adjusted, so a small precinct can sit low on the volume table while having more crime per resident than a large one; five-year trends compare against a fixed baseline year and can swing on a single unusual year in small precincts; and all figures are reported crime for the whole precinct, not the individual suburb. The rankings cover the precincts SafeSuburb publishes, ordered by SAPS figures as published, nothing more.

Data corrections

We log material corrections to how we process SAPS data here, as part of presenting it faithfully.

• May 2026 — three SAPS categories restored to totals. Between March and May 2026, three reported-crime categories — Commercial crime, All theft not mentioned elsewhere, and Sexual offences detected as a result of police action — were unintentionally excluded from precinct totals due to a processing error on our side (they were mistakenly treated as duplicate subtotal rows). This understated the totals shown on precinct pages by roughly 20% on average, with a larger effect on business-district and commercial precincts. We corrected it on 29 May 2026: all totals, trends vs the prior year, and category breakdowns now reflect the complete SAPS station-level category set. SAPS's published figures were never affected — this was solely an error in how we processed them. See our Disclaimer regarding data accuracy and completeness.
• May 2026 — robbery sub-types no longer double-counted. SAPS reports carjacking, truck hijacking, cash-in-transit robbery, bank robbery, and house/business robbery both individually and within the headline Robbery with aggravating circumstances category. We had been adding both, which overstated totals by roughly 3% on average. We now count aggravated robbery once and treat those as a breakdown within it (see "How aggravated robbery is counted" above). As with the categories above, SAPS's published figures were unaffected — this was solely a processing error on our side.
• July 2026 — corrected an inaccurate statement about renamed stations. This page previously stated that where SAPS renames a station, "the historical record continues under the new name". That was not correct. When a station is renamed, SAPS reports the old and new names as separate rows, and our process excluded the old row — so the earlier years were dropped rather than carried forward. Twenty Eastern Cape precincts consequently showed a shortened history until we restored it, as described below. We found this on 29 July 2026 while reviewing an unrelated feature, and corrected the statement the same day. Why our checks did not catch it: our automated data tests verify internal consistency — that category counts sum to the totals we publish, that no precinct is orphaned, and that the percentage changes vs the prior year are arithmetically right. A precinct with a five-year history satisfies every one of those tests, because the missing years are absent rather than wrong. Nothing compared the length of each precinct's record against the SAPS source. We have since added that comparison as an automated check, and on 29 July 2026 we restored the missing years: 20 renamed stations now carry their pre-rename history, recovering 160 precinct-years of record. SAPS's published figures were never affected — this concerned which of them we carried forward.
• July 2026 — volume tiers corrected for 53 precincts to use the published-precinct set. Volume tier quintiles for 53 precincts, mostly in the Eastern Cape, had previously been calculated against a station set that included the unpublished stations described in "Excluded stations" above. We corrected this on 16 July 2026 so quintiles are computed over the published precincts only, consistent with the rest of this page. SAPS's published figures were unaffected — this was solely a computation-scope error on our side.
• August 2026 — 58 suburbs were showing another station's crime figures. Our suburb-to-precinct mapping was inferred from community sources and had never been checked against an authoritative boundary, because until August 2026 we had not obtained one. When we did, 58 suburbs turned out to sit inside a different station's catchment from the one we published them under — so they showed that station's crime figures instead of their own. The error was systematic rather than random: suburbs with their own police station were routed to the main town station, so the effect fell along township and town-centre lines. Ikwezi, for example, showed Mthatha's 4,672 crimes rather than Ngangelizwe's 991. We corrected all 58 on 3 August 2026, each with a redirect from the old address. Why our checks did not catch it: a suburb mapped to the wrong station is perfectly self-consistent — it has a real precinct, real figures and a working page — so there was nothing internally inconsistent to detect. The error was in the correspondence to reality, which no internal check can see. What we changed: every build now verifies each located suburb against the official SAPS polygons and fails if any mapping drifts. Corrections are only applied when a second, independent government dataset agrees, because the boundary comparison alone is right about three times in four. SAPS's published figures were never affected — this concerned which station's figures we showed you.
• August 2026 — Bloemfontein CBD moved from Mangaung to Park Road. The Bloemfontein CBD page published the Mangaung station's figures, 3,205 crimes in 2025/26. Two official sources show that station does not cover the CBD at all: overlaying the Statistics South Africa Census 2011 sub-place "Bloemfontein Central" on the official SAPS station boundaries puts 84.9% of it inside Park Road and 15.1% inside Navalsig, with no part of it inside Mangaung, whose nearest boundary is about 2.2 km away. The page now shows Park Road's figures, 8,726 crimes in 2025/26, so the number on that page has gone up. The old address redirects to the new one. This suburb had never been checkable before, because our slug says "CBD" while the census layer calls the same place "Central", so the name match missed it. SAPS's published figures were never affected. This concerned which station's figures we showed you.
• August 2026 — one Bloemfontein city centre, published as two pages. We were publishing both a "Bloemfontein CBD" page and a "Bloemfontein Central" page for the same physical place, and they showed different crime figures: 8,726 crimes for 2025/26 on one and 3,205 on the other, a difference of 2.72 times. The Census 2011 sub-place layer holds a single polygon for the Bloemfontein city centre, named "Bloemfontein Central", and both of our pages had been located from that one polygon, at the same point. There is no separate "Bloemfontein CBD" area in the census layer, or anywhere else we could find: Wikipedia's article on Bloemfontein Central opens by calling it Bloemfontein CBD, and the area it gives, 2.58 km², is the area of that polygon. On 9 August 2026 we resolved the two into one page, at Bloemfontein CBD, which carries the corrected Park Road figures. The Bloemfontein Central address redirects there. We kept the "CBD" name because that is what people search for: over the 90 days to 9 August, Google showed our pages 58 times for "bloemfontein cbd" and twice for "bloemfontein central". Why our checks did not catch it: two pages for one place are individually valid, and the rules we use to find duplicate suburb names compare spelling. "CBD" and "Central" mean the same thing to a reader and share no letters, so no spelling rule could pair them. What we changed: we now also treat two suburbs located at the same census point as a duplicate candidate, which finds this case regardless of what the two are called. SAPS's published figures were never affected.
• August 2026 — eight pages showed a partial year labelled "Full year". In its Q4 2025/26 release SAPS renamed four Eastern Cape stations: Aberdeen to Xamdeboo, Barkly East to Ekhephinit, East London to Kugompo, and Graaff-Reinet to Robert Sobukwe. The first nine months of 2025/26 are reported under the old name and the last three months under the new one, so we were publishing each station as two pages, each holding part of the year, and both marked complete. The East London page showed 4,063 crimes for 2025/26 when the true full-year figure is 5,556, an understatement of 27%, and a year-on-year change of −7.9% when the true change is −3.7%. Aberdeen showed 270 against 342, Barkly East 351 against 484, Graaff-Reinet 1,975 against 2,602. Thirty-two precinct-years were affected in total, going back to 2021/22 on the new-name pages. On 9 August 2026 we merged each pair into a single page under the name SAPS now uses, carrying the full thirteen-year history, and the old addresses redirect to it. Why our checks did not catch it: the totals were correct arithmetic over the months we had — the categories summed, the percentages were right, nothing was inconsistent. The fault was that our processing counted how many quarters the province had published rather than how many that station had, so every precinct claimed a complete year whether or not it had one, and the test meant to catch this compared that count against a flag derived from the same count. What we changed: a year is now counted from the source columns actually read for that station, the build fails outright if any year claims to be complete without four of them, and a separate check confirms no page can print "Full year" over an incomplete one. We also added a way to confirm a rename from the figures themselves: SAPS republishes the earlier quarters under the new name, so the two names match exactly where they overlap — all four pairs matched on every category in two separate financial years. SAPS's published figures were never affected; this concerned how we assembled them into a year.
• August 2026 — twenty renamed stations understated two early years. SAPS publishes the same crime data twice: a quarterly series with 30 categories and an annual series with 25. For the twenty Eastern Cape stations whose pre-rename history we merged in July 2026, we had taken 2019/20 and 2020/21 from the annual series, although the quarterly series carries both years in full under the old name. Those forty precinct-years were therefore short by the five categories the annual series omits. MaXesibeni's 2019/20 showed 1,224 against a true 1,411; most were understated by about 3%, the largest by 15%. We corrected this on 9 August 2026: a pre-rename year now comes from the quarterly series whenever all four of its quarters exist, and the annual series is used only for 2013/14 to 2018/19, which the quarterly series does not reach. Why our checks did not catch it: the check we added in July asks whether a station's record starts as early as the source allows, and these records did — the years were present, just assembled from the thinner of the two sources. SAPS's published figures were never affected.

URL structure

Suburb pages follow the pattern /province/district/precinct/suburb/. When a police station serves a single main town with the same name, the URL will repeat the name (e.g. /hermanus/hermanus/). The first is the precinct (police station), the second is the suburb. The precinct page at /hermanus/ lists all suburbs served by that station.

Suburbs spanning multiple precincts

SAPS precinct boundaries don't always follow suburb lines. Across all provinces, 87 suburbs are physically split across two or more police precincts. For these suburbs, we show crime data from all relevant precincts on a single page so you can see the full picture without needing to know which precinct covers your street.

Search results show the volume tier from the primary precinct (listed first alphabetically). The suburb page shows both precincts' crime totals, trends, and breakdowns side by side.