The latest crime statistics released by the police ministry showed that the Free State was the only province to show a decrease in car hijackings.
A total of 258 hijackings were recorded in the province from April 2015 to March 2016 – an overall drop of 4.4 percent.
Nationally the number of hijackings increased drastically to 14.3 percent. The total number of car hijackings in the recorded period stood at 14 602, an average of 40 hijackings a day. Truck hijackings decreased by 7.4 percent.
Johan Burger from the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) says the figures suggest that South Africa is losing the war against organised crime.
“This is really worrying, but you should also point out that in total over the last four years there was a 55 percent increase in car hijackings. Clearly the criminals are having a field day.
You know, when the police adopted well planned national plans to deal with specific crimes in the past, they decreased those crime levels drastically.
What we now need to do is to adopt an overall national strategy to deal with aggravated robberies in all forms. You can implement plans that are derived from the national plans in each of the provinces and lower down the line.
The point here is there are things that we can do to combat this crime and we do not have to wait for all the police structures to be fixed,” says Burger.
-Mark Steenbok
