Independent crime analyst, Chris de Kock, says he has identified some discrepancies in the recently released crime statistics for Gauteng.
The crime statistics that the province’s Police Commissioner Elias Mawela released on Tuesday showed that assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm (GBH), common assault and aggravated robbery continued to account for the bulk of reported overall crimes in Gauteng.
Delivering the quarterly crime statistics, Mawela said the murder rate was alarming and sexual offences increased by more than 11%.
The crime categories contributed to one third of overall crime in the province.
De Kock says he has fund some exaggerations in the figures after recalculating.
“I think police made a mistake provincially in Gauteng, in the sense that they compared this year’s quarter 21/22 to the one [from] last year. They should actually have compared it to 2019/2020 because that was the normal quarter.”
“It was not a COVID quarter, if I can call it like that. And if you do those calculations you find that many of the crimes that they have indicated as increases have actually decreased,” explains De Kock.
The video below discusses the crime stats:
