South Africa’s crime statistics for the 2006/2007 criminal year* were released yesterday. The press has been going wild**.
Although there has been a small increase in crime between the last reporting period and this one, overall numbers are significantly down on 2001/2002, by between 10% and 35%, depending on the crime.
Notable among the released data, or at least the published news reports, is the fact that incidents of murder have increased by 3.54% (oh noes!), while incidents of attempted murder have decreased by 2.09% (awsum!). I believe, however, that there is a deeper and sinister message in these figures, which I shall now expose.
Murder and attempted murder are pretty much the same thing. In the first instance, the murder shows some degree of competence. In the second, he or she has failed in their goal. Grouping these crimes together, we see a 0.58% increase in “murderous attacks”.
Things become more disturbing of you use these figures to calculate the efficiency of our murderers, specifically the proportion of them who succeeded. The figure was 47.43% in 2005/2006, and it has increased to 48.83% in 2006/2007.
Furthermore, if you plot the efficiency of murderers over all available reporting periods, you find that there is a disturbing upward trend.
The efficiency of our murderers has increased by a fraction over 30% since 2002/2003.
What is happening here? Well, I believe that a medical metaphor is most appropriate. When you are ill and take antibiotics, your body becomes better at fighting what we doctors*** call “germs”. Because germs mutate quickly, some of them will be more resistant to the antibiotic than others. As you get better, the proportion of resistant germs in your body will increase. These usually all get killed anyway, but you will sometimes require a different antibiotic to get rid of the very resistant ones.
If criminals are like germs, then South African law-enforcement policies are currently breeding better murderers. This is a bad thing, although it might also mean that our average intelligence is increasing, which is something of a silver lining.
I believe that these figures clearly indicate that it is time for our law-enforcement agencies to mix things up a little. They should try new approaches, without compromising their existing methods, to try and eradicate this new breed of super-murderer. Failure to do so could, sooner or later, result in a murdering pandemic, a reign of terror in which all law-abiding citizens are at the mercy of a new wave of master-criminals. Act now! Also, remember that it is important to finish your course.
*: Financial year, criminal year – potato, po-tah-toe.
**: In this story, IOL or SAPA got the figures wrong. I’ll be using my own calculations for the rest of this post, which happen to match those of the SAPS.
***: Not really.
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