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

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.

Some later evolved into sophisticated criminal networks.

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

Violence problem is far from solved

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.

Trust in the police had fallen from about 40% in the late 1990s to roughly 22% today, Lancaster said. That loss of trust means fewer reports, less community cooperation and weaker investigations.

What needs to change?

Lancaster outlined eight priorities for reducing violence.

Illegal firearms must be taken out of circulation, and organised-crime networks – not just their foot soldiers – must be targeted with specialised investigative capacity.

She called for cooperation across the government, business, academia, civil society and communities, alongside the responsible use of technology.

She also argued for rebuilding the criminal justice system and anti-corruption architecture, and restoring the capacity to investigate and prosecute crime. This will require investment and political will.

Prevention is equally important. This means supporting parents, addressing the conditions that reproduce violence across generations, and making safety central to local government.

Finally, interventions must be measured to establish what works, what does not, and what needs to change.

Lancaster’s central message was that South Africa’s crime trajectory was not predetermined. The country had cut the murder rate before and it was experiencing another period of declining violent crime.

The challenge was sustaining those gains.

“Violence is preventable,” Lancaster said, “and it starts with us.” DM