A functional crime and population map viewer for South Africa

by Matthew Baas

This post presents a simple visualizer for crime statistics in South Africa and some demographic information.

TL;DR: In South Africa, our police serivce SAPS releases quarterly crime statistics down to the police precinct level. Upon looking online, I could not find any good visualizer for the geographic breakdown of crimes that was (1) functional and feature complete, and (2) free. So, I created one: standard-crime-stats.rf5.me

A functional crime and population map viewer for South Africa

The website is rather self-explanatory, and has the following features:

• Absolute and per-capita values for all crime categories for national, provincial, and district/metro aggregation levels.
• Absolute values for all crime categories for precinct/police station levels. This limitation is because it was not possible to accurately find population counts for police precinct jurisdiction areas.
• Multiple color scales.
• Comparisons to the same quarter from prior years, showing absolute and relative changes.
• Demographic information provided by StatsSA showing the racial categories for every census ward from the 2021 census. Every person is racially categorized as mandated by the ANC government, and I used the categories they impose since it is the only granularity of data publically available.

All data is sourced from public sources, mostly from StatsSA, Demarcations South Africa, the IEC, or SAPS. The website at launch appears as below:

Continuing improvements and support

This post is much shorter than prior ones, however the main work for it appears in the visualizer site itself, and I encourage the reader to check it out: https://standard-crime-stats.rf5.me/

Currently I am hosting it for free, so any donations or tips are appreciated. Please head to the about page for info on giving tips or getting in contact. While I have spare time, I will try keep the website updated with the latest data as time goes on. Depending on support, I might also add other features and visualizations (e.g. party voting lines / map) to site. All that I ask is that, if you use the visualization in a publication or statement anywhere, an acknowledgement would be appreciated :).

And as always, if you spot any mistakes or have any comments in general, feel free to get in touch with me via the about page.

Thanks for reading!