Solution To Crime In South Africa

[adrianh]

When I walk down a road and a dog attacks me, I give it a swift kick. The second time I give it a harder swift kick. From then on I carry a 357 Magnum when I walk down that road. I don't pat the dog, talk nice to it, give it a shelter with hundreds of other dogs and feed it a nice meal.

When a murderer says that it is great to be in jail because he has a bed and three meals a day, which he never had, your first world justice simply has no value. First world justice means absolutely nothing to a third world mind. It means as much to that mind as fuzzy logic does to a 4 year old child that grew up in the bush.

An eye for an eye - like it is said in the good book.

[tec0]

In the end it is true that logic goes out the window... But it doesn’t matter what you or I say, to the law we are irrelevant and is subject to imprisonment if we question the law. So, perhaps anarchy will prevail. Our history is full of revolutions and it did change the world.

I think it is just a question of time when all our systems and control measures fail. But this also comes with a warning; If all the systems fail, human morality fails with it.

[adrianh]

Man is a simple animal with an IBM XT on top of a monkey brain. The two are in a recursive loop giving the impression of intelligence. We are the ghost in the machine. The "civilized" ones tend to use the XT a bit more that the others. Most of the ones running the XT's a bit more think that they are actually Cray's but that the only run one Pentium III processor. I got news for you, you are not a Cray and you overclock your XT, your IO ports are crap, you have haphazard base memory and your operating system is Man OS rev 1.1c. Your IO port firewalls filter and alter input haphazardly and changes depending on your chemistry at the time. If we evolve for another 200,000 years we may become 286's but then, we will probably end up destoying our power supply only to start all over again as apes. Darwin and natural selection laugh at our endevours to evolve by ourselves. We are like sheep trying to will ourselves into growing wings and fly. And yes, I speak for myself too, my XT and monkey brain don't always sync up too nicely. Sometimes my monkey brain is in control and sometimes my XT is in control. Most of the time fate is in control.

[Dave A]

Most of the time fate is in control.

Perhaps fate expects your intervention to achieve its goal

The bigger the numbers, the more predictable the outcomes including the effect of aberrations.

[adrianh]

The bigger the numbers, the more predictable the outcomes including the effect of aberrations.

There are lies, damned lies and then there are statistics.

We have taken 1 trillion samples of Nelson Mandela's life. In each sample he never died once - therefore he is immortal.

Unfortunately statistics are only as good as the assumptions that they are based on and even if the assumptions are good, staticians are unable to predict Black Swan events.

[Dave A]

The weakness is not in the numbers, it is in the extrapolation and interpretation.

But I'm more interested in the fatalist implications, chief being if you can't affect the outcome; if fate rules, why try to do anything?

[Chatmaster]

I thought it to be a good idea to through a bit of fuel on the fire.

Interestingly it is nearly impossible to obtain crime statistics pre 1994. I firmly believe it is to ensure that there is no way for anyone to compare the apartheid government with the ANC government. But my opinion is worth very little in that regard.

However I did find some information from the CIA and Interpol that in summary stated that from 1950 to 1993 there was a total of 309,000 murders in South Africa and Namibia combined over the 44 year period. (Remember that SA was a protectorate of Namibia) Anyway, that equates to an average of 7,000 murders per year. Since 1994 We had an average murder rate (excluding Namibia) of 47,000 murders per year!

Now to put this in perspective we need to add the population totals of 1950 and compare those to 2010. The official statistics shows that SA population in 1950 was 13,595,000 and for 2010 is 49,109,100. Keep in mind that the 1950 count excluded people living in Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei. This indicates to me that there is something seriously wrong here!

A further issue I have is that according to report issued by Interpol in 2001 they stated that the official murder rate issued by the SAPS was only about half of the actual figure! This means that the actual murder rate would not have been 24,000 for that year but according to Interpol 47,800! This same discrepancy was also noted by Medical Research Council as their figures was also exceptionally higher than that of the SAPS.

One last bit of paraffin on the fire: 94% of all persons released after spending their sentence in jail immediately return to crime!!!

[adrianh]

I think that crime stats are fairly useless. Many crimes are simply not reported to the police because people know that the police will do nothing anyway. A lot of women feel ashamed about reporting rape. Why would anybody living in a township bother to report a crime comitted against them, all that would happen is that they will be victimised. Pre '94 crime statistics are just as useless for the exact same reasons.

If 94% of people released from jail return to crime it proves that jail sentences have no value. If the person is dirt poor and lives in a shack to start with, sitting in jail ain't going to make any difference to his life anyway. I stand by what I say - swift harsh public punishment. You have to punish a first world man with first world methods.

[tec0]

Honestly this subject is debatable and the dynamics of the subject are almost infinite. How do you stop crime? The truth is if you eliminate the financial aspect of crime, you are left with sadistic crimes or hate crimes and its many aspects.

It is clear prisons don’t work. So will public mutilations work? Probably yes, it’s kind of hard to steel with no hands. Castrations along with removing a leg will definitely stop a rapist. Executing murderers will remove them permanently.

Realistically however... We have our backs against the wall and no way to protect ourselves, so other then wishful thinking to nurture hope, there is not much we can do... We simply have to deal with the fact that we are powerless.

This time around the criminals won and our own laws are protecting the criminals so what is the use of law then?

[Butch Hannan]

I bet you this one has been solved already. Our firms delivery driver told me on Monday that his sister who is a police woman was robbed in her house on Saturday of valuables and her service firearm. On Tuesday he told me that one of the culprits had been shot dead on the Monday and some of the valuables and the firearm recovered.

Butch Hannan