Jury still out on crime site

2003-09-30 18:20

Cape Town - The country's only independent website providing crime statistics nationally celebrates its one-month birthday on Wednesday, said group managing director of Ornico 1to1, the software company who developed the site.

"It is going well, a fantastic response with over 100 000 hits," said Spero Patricios on Tuesday.

He said the CrimeStats.co.za site has been slightly upgraded to show statistics in a graphic format.

Patricios said about 80% of the respondents, who were allowed to report crime incidents on-line starting from 2000, were from the Gauteng region.

Asked how data integrity could be verified, Patricios said they would be submitting the statistics to a bureau for confirmation and analysis.

" ...For example Statistics SA, where an aggregation will be done to verify the data."

He did not feel the impersonal, anonymous nature of logging crime incidents was an obstacle.

"There is no value for people to put in false information," he said, adding that the verification process would ultimately take the scenario of disinformation into account.

Patricios said they were not competing with the police, but were providing a service "made by the people, for the people" to augment what the police were doing.

He said his organisation was apolitical and felt that there were more important issues to confront than to "use the site as political fodder" by political parties.

He said there were a number of smaller communities of interest, which have been able to bring down crime in particular areas, that have joined the site.

"The organisation Residents Against Crime, based in the Randburg/Fourways area in Gauteng, have brought down crime in that area by just e-mailing one another alerts about suspicious cars or characters. We are taking their information and putting it into our software engine so that we can monitor and see what trends develop."

A Sapa reporter who visited the site said, however, that there seemed to be a large number of tiny, rural villages and towns listed on the site, with no corresponding number of urban and peri-urban areas.

However, it also did not register any murders in for example in Khayelitsha, a national crime hotspot with the highest incidents of murder in the country.

Asked whether or not the site was accessible to those sections of society most affected by crime, Patricios said there were many people who worked and came from poorer areas "who would in time" access the site on computers.

"By this time next year we would be able to show a trend, for example of rape, in Khayelitsha," he confidently predicted.

Some of the crimes currently listed on the site included a smash and grab in Johannesburg's CBD, a mugging in The Glen, south of Johannesburg, a dog poisoning in The Reeds, near Pretoria, vandalism in the northern Johannesburg suburb, Westcliff, and a rape in Soweto - indicative of the fact that most incidents were Gauteng based, and also that most were in more privileged areas.

- SAPA