South Africa’s 2015/16 crime statistics - read our factsheet

The South African police released their statistics on the number of crimes recorded in the 2015/16 reporting year, running from 1 April 2015 to 31 March 2016, on 2 September in parliament.

The police released the crime statistics as absolute numbers – that being how many crimes were recorded in 2015/16. Below we have included the crime rates, calculated with Statistics South Africa’s mid-year population estimates. This refers to the number of crimes committed per 100,000 people in a country.

Crime rates are more useful than absolute numbers for comparing changes over time, as they allow you to make fair comparisons between different population sizes.

This is because – generally – the number of crimes committed will increase as a population grows. The crime rate allows us to see whether crimes have increased or decreased in relation to the size of the population.

We summarised crimes of public interest in this factsheet.

Click here to read the factsheet.