Methodology
How the figures are calculated
Every number on CrimeMap SA is either a source value or a documented derivation from source values. Nothing is imputed, forecast or converted into a calendar year.
Financial years
The South African Police Service reports crime by financial year, which runs from 1 April to 31 March. 2024/25 therefore covers 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025.
Labels such as 2024/25 always mean 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025. CrimeMap SA never splits or restates those years as calendar years.
What is in the headline total
“Recorded crime” on this site is the sum of the 17 community-reported serious crime categories in the source. Nested totals in the source — aggravated robbery and sexual offences — already include their subcategories, so the subcategories are not added again.
The 4 police-action categories (illegal firearms, drug crime, driving under the influence, and police-detected sexual offences) are shown separately. They largely reflect policing activity rather than public reports, so they are not part of the headline total.
Missing values and negatives
If the source does not provide a figure, CrimeMap SA shows “Not available”. A missing value is never treated as zero.
The source contains some negative values, almost all in sexual-offence breakdowns for early years. A count of recorded crimes cannot be negative, so those values are stored exactly as distributed and treated as missing in every calculation.
Year-on-year change
Percentage change is (current − previous) / previous × 100, rounded to one decimal place. If the previous value is zero and the current value is above zero, the change is labelled “Newly recorded” rather than as a percentage. If either value is missing, the change is unavailable.
A previous count below 10 is flagged as a small base, because a single extra case moves a small number by a large percentage. A change is only listed under “what’s changing” when the previous count is at least 10, the absolute movement is at least 5, and the percentage movement is at least 5%.
Places and the map
Each map circle is a police station, placed at the coordinates in the source. The dataset does not include precinct boundary polygons, so CrimeMap SA does not draw precincts as areas.
Province is derived from the source district municipality using a documented Statistics South Africa lookup. It is not a column in the SAPS file.
Search matches police station, municipality, district and province names in the dataset. Suburb names such as Bromhof are not in that file. When a search matches no source name, CrimeMap SA looks the place up geographically and offers the nearest stations. That is a distance hint, not an official statement of which precinct a suburb falls in.
Historical context
Five-year and ten-year averages are the mean of recorded totals whose financial years fall in that window, counting only years the source provides. A missing year is omitted from the mean rather than treated as zero. If fewer years exist than the window, the average uses the years that are present and the page says how many.
Historical high and low are the maximum and minimum recorded totals in the available series. Ties are assigned to the most recent year that holds the extreme value.
Unusual movements
A latest year-on-year percentage is compared with earlier comparable percentages for the same station or category, not with a national ranking. A movement is comparable only when both years have a figure, the previous-year count is at least 10, and the change is not a rise from zero.
At least five earlier comparable movements are required. The latest movement is the largest recorded increase or decrease when it is strictly larger than every earlier comparable movement in that direction. It is notable when it is not the series extreme but its absolute percentage is at least 1.5 times the median of earlier absolute percentages, and it still clears the “what’s changing” size rules. Otherwise it is described as within the historical range. If those conditions are not met, no unusual claim is made.
Map year-on-year change
The optional year-on-year map layer colours a local municipality from the stations that have a figure in both the selected year and the previous year. Stations with a missing value are left out of that municipality’s change rather than counted as zero. A previous-year count below 10 is not painted as a percentage. A change of 10% or more is a strong movement; movements inside 2% are treated as broadly unchanged, matching the rest of the site.
Source
Figures are crimes recorded by South African Police Service (SAPS), organised by police station and financial year. CrimeMap SA does not host or link to the underlying file.