THE GATHERING 2026: SA has reduced violent crime before and can do it again, says justice expert

Violent crime in South Africa is declining, but the gains remain fragile and uneven, according to Lizette Lancaster from the ISS, with organised crime, illegal firearms and weak police detection continuing to pose major threats.

Organised crime cannot be separated from the country’s history of exclusion, forced removals and economic marginalisation, said Lizette Lancaster, head of the Justice and Violence Prevention Programme at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), at Daily Maverick’s The Gathering 2026 in Cape Town on Friday, 11 September.

“Everyone knows South Africa has a lot of crime and violence. That is not my message today. My message is that our path is not fixed,” Lancaster said.

There was no single explanation for South Africa’s violence, she said. Its roots are social, economic, historical and psychological.

She began by tracing the crisis of violence in South Africa back to the goldfields of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and Nongoloza Mathebula, whose outlaw organisation and mythology later became intertwined with the prison Numbers gangs.

Before the 1972 starting point of her murder-rate analysis, she said, communities such as Sophiatown and District Six had been forcibly removed and excluded from the formal economy, creating conditions in which gangs could offer protection, belonging and economic survival.

On the Cape Flats, some of these structures evolved into entrenched criminal networks. Lancaster cited research identifying 13 major gangs in 2019, with an estimated 72,000 members.

Today, Lancaster said, these networks intersect with illicit drugs, illegal firearms, extortion, the taxi and construction industries, assassinations and politically connected organised crime.

She highlighted a significant shift in South Africa’s crime trajectory: the murder rate has fallen substantially from its pre-democracy peak, and over the past two years, sustained declines have been recorded for most serious violent crimes after rising sharply after 2011.

But South Africa remains deeply violent. Attempted murder, driven largely by firearm crime, and commercial and digital crime are increasing, and incidents of kidnapping have quadrupled over the past decade.

The murder rate was about seven times the global average and nearly four times the African average, Lancaster said.

Violence is also highly concentrated. In 2024/25, Tshwane recorded the lowest of the metros’ murder rates – 17 murders per 100,000 people – compared with 71 in Nelson Mandela Bay.

About half of all murders occur in roughly 12% of police precincts, most of them in metropolitan areas.

Lancaster said the murder detection rate had fallen from about 31% in 2011 to just over 10% today, meaning that while fewer murders had been recorded in recent years, the state was also becoming less effective at identifying those responsible for the murders.