Crime Statistics in South Africa
Introduction
South Africa has had a long history of crime and most of the crimes committed are either murder or rape. Violent crime remains an ever-present threat in South Africa. Does the continued rise in crime in South Africa a sign of deeper social and economic problems among its large population? Common crimes include burglary at residences, common assault, armed robbery, drug related crimes ,theft out of motor vehicles , home invasion, property theft and arson . Drug related crime is the most prevalent major crime in South Africa.
In this analysis we will see what Provinces are most crime prone and what crimes are the most prevalent. Several data analysis and visualization tools among them Tableau and Excel Pivot Charts have been utilized to arrive at these conclusions. The dataset was pulled from kaggel.com and didn't require any cleaning or preparation as it had already been cleaned and prepped for analysis. We also looked at the population density of the provinces to see whether there was any correlation between crime rate committed and population density.
https://www.kaggle.com/slwessels/crime-statistics-for-south-africa
Charts and Tables were created using Tableau and Excel please see Tableau link below;
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/kiio.mutua/viz/CrimeStatisticsSouthAfrica/Dashboard1
For the sake of this project, the following questions will be answered;
- What Province(s) had the highest population density ?
- Does population density play a part in increasing the crime rate index ?
- What types of crimes were most prevalent ?
- What were the crime rates between 2006 and 2016 ? Has there been an increase or decrease in the overall crime rate index?
What Provinces have the highest population density?
From our analysis of the population density of the provinces in South Africa Gauteng Province has the highest population density at 675.1(number of people / square miles(or kilometers of land) . Kwazulu/Natal Province has population density of 108.8 while Mpumalanga Province has a population density of 52.8.
Does population density increase the crime rate in South Africa? Some oppose this correlation between density, population and crime rate ,but Gauteng Province seems to follow this pattern , it has the highest crime rate in South Africa across all categories of criminal activities.
The most densely populated Provinces in South Africa are Gauteng province, Kwazulu/Natal province and Mpumalanga Province. At the other end of the spectrum Northern Cape ,Free State and North West are the most sparsely populated provinces respectively.
Does population density play a part in increasing the crime rate index ?
In this section we will look at how the population density is related to the crime rate index , we take a look at the population density in different provinces in South Africa . How has population density increased criminal activity in South Africa ? We will look at the most densely populated provinces and then the sparsely populated provinces and compare the crimes rates between them.
From the graphs below all the provinces have experienced population growth apart from Eastern Cape which had a population decline of- 1 % with Gauteng Province having the highest population growth at 14.02 %.
Population Growth is expected to continue in South Africa, although at a slower rate than in the past century. Based on current projections, South Africa’s population will continue to grow to over 80 million by 2082 before leveling out and declining for the rest of the century. The country’s population growth rate is currently at 1.28% per year.
The relationship between population density and crime rate is not as we expected an increase in population density will result in increased criminal activities. But in the two charts below the overall crime rate has gone down despite an increase in population. The only exception is Western Cape where an increase in population density has resulted in a substantial increase in criminal activities.
What types of crimes were most prevalent ?
This section will answers the last two questions set forth at the start of this analysis ; What types of crimes were most prevalent ? and What were the crime rates between 2006 and 2016 ? Has there been an increase or decrease in overall crime rates?
The crime rate index has been compared between two different time periods 2006 and 2016, the purpose is to find out whether the crime rate index has increased or decreased over this 10 year period. There were around 30 categories of criminal activities recorded over this 10 year period but for the purpose of this analysis only the top 10 categories were filtered and added to the charts.
The overall crime rate percentage between 2006 and 2016 has gone down across all the crime categories. Drug related crime is the only category that has gone up from 5.29% to 14.89% while theft out of a motor vehicle and robbery with aggravating circumstances increased slightly by least a 1% increase.
Conclusion
To conclude this analysis is only based on population density and its effect on the crime rate index but other factors like age ,income and education of the population were not included in the dataset and will need to be included to give an accurate assessment of factors affecting criminal activities in a population of a country. In addition, to see whether an increase in population will result in increase in the crime rate index another population data set for the provinces at the end of 2016 was collected and utilized. But since the last population census was done in 2017 I used the census figures for 2017 * for analysis.
