Why Cape Town’s murder rate is rising

“IT’S going to be crazy tonight,” sighs Craven Engel, a pastor in Hanover Park, a township on the fringes of Cape Town. A few hours earlier gunmen had killed a high-ranking member of the Laughing Boys, a gang. Mr Engel is on his phone, trying to dissuade its leaders from vengeance, which is just hours away. “Everyone has a violent vibe going on.”

Since the advent of democracy in 1994, South Africa as a whole has had less of a violent vibe. The murder rate—the best indicator of violent crime, as most cases are reported—has fallen by almost half, from 69 per 100,000 people in 1994/95 to 36 in 2017/18. International data are patchy, but they suggest that since the end of apartheid South Africa went from being the world’s third-most-murderous country to the seventh. Nevertheless, its murder rate has recently ticked up, from a low of 30 per 100,000 in 2011/12. The jump last year was the biggest since 1994.

Cape Town’s murder rate has risen from 43 to 69 per 100,000 between 2009/10 and 2017/18, calculates Anine Kriegler of the University of Cape Town. Last year’s rise was the biggest since comparable data became available in 2005/06. Today its rate is more than twice that of Johannesburg (see chart) and higher than in any large city outside the Americas, according to the Igarapé Institute, a Brazilian think-tank.

That may surprise those who associate Cape Town with beaches and Table Mountain. But a short drive from some of the priciest property in Africa are the Cape Flats, a patchwork of townships. Many were dumping grounds when the apartheid regime removed “Coloureds” (people of mixed race) from the inner city in the 1960s. Unemployment and poverty are endemic. Most children grow up fatherless. In one precinct, Philippi East, 93% of households were victims of crime in 2016.

The Flats also contain gangs. In few cities globally are they so deeply rooted. The “numbers” prison gangs have such complex rules that they speak their own language. They trace their history back more than a century. Street gangs were present before forced removals but, over the past five decades, have become entrenched. A higher share of young people are affiliated to gangs than in cities such as Baltimore.

One member who lives in Hanover Park explains his initiation into the Americans, probably the largest gang. At 13 he was given a knife with which he had to stab someone before two peers, then wipe the blood on an American flag. Membership gave him an identity, food, clothes—and a way to impress girls. But it meant killing. “The brotherhood is real even if the way we show that love is wrong,” he says.

Gangs are not the only source of murder in the city. But they have caused a “substantial portion” of the recent surge, notes Mark Shaw, a criminologist who runs the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime. Since 2011 every police precinct in a known gang area has seen a rise in the murder rate. “We have become desensitised,” says a resident of Manenberg, another township. She no longer covers dead bodies so that they are not seen by children coming home from school.

Today about 100,000 people on the Flats belong to more than 130 gangs, in an unstable patchwork of alliances. As members pass in and out of jail, lines blur between prison and street gangs, creating new rivalries. As members age, intergenerational friction appears. Pastor Engel recalls a school gang, the Spoiled Brats, set up by children of Americans gang members. The offspring got too uppity, so their fathers, and another gang, turned on them. Just two of its 22 members are still alive.

These gangs are increasingly sophisticated and commercialised operations, which use a mix of street muscle and assassinations to amass power. The biggest street gangs are fronts for vast mafia-like enterprises, complete with links to policemen and politicians. When changes take place in the markets they are involved in, it can encourage new entrants and battles for turf, leading to surges in violence.

One such disruption has been in the drug market, especially heroin. As more of it has been shipped through South Africa, partly because other routes have become trickier, domestic use of the drug has risen. From 2000 to 2015 drug-related arrests in the Western Cape rose nearly sixfold.

There are a lot more guns around, too. The rise in the murder rate in Cape Town matches the arrival of high-powered weapons in the Flats, notes Guy Lamb of the University of Cape Town. These weapons “disrupted the balance of power among the gangs”, he says.

Shockingly, these guns often come from the police. In 2016 Chris Prinsloo, a former police colonel, pleaded guilty to selling 2,400 guns to an arms-dealer who sold them on to gangsters. Investigators have linked 1,066 murders and 1,403 attempted ones in Cape Town to these firearms, including 261 cases in which children were victims. More than half the guns are probably still circulating. Mr Shaw calls the case “the deadliest crime in the history of post-apartheid South Africa”.

The Prinsloo case points to a broader problem: the rottenness of the South African Police Service (SAPS). Not since Nelson Mandela’s presidency has a national police commissioner left office without being charged with corruption or misconduct. In May, Arno Lamoer, the former police commissioner for the Western Cape, was jailed for up to six years for corruption. On the ground, gangs recruit corrupt officers. These cops provide tip-offs about raids. They tamper with court dockets of arrested members for as little as R2,500 ($174). The conviction rate for gang murders in the Flats is about 2%. “If the police act like gangsters, how can we identify the real criminals?” asks Roegchanda Pascoe, an activist in Manenberg.

In response to the failings of the SAPS, the city of Cape Town has expanded the remit of its police. Historically devoted to catching parking offenders, the metro police now has an anti-gang unit. But it has only 600 officers, compared with 18,000 for the SAPS in the city.

Local leaders such as Pastor Engel try to do their bit. With funds from the city, he uses technology to detect gunshots. Once they are picked up he sends ex-gang members to try to prevent retaliation. Looking at his map, he tries to work out where shootings will take place. Blocks of two or three streets are prized territory, each with their own names such as Cowboy Town, Taliban Area and the Jungle. “I call it the prison,” he says, tracing a line with his finger around the map. “A violent prison.”