by Ernst Roets
Zweli Mnisi, the Minister’s spokesperson at the time, echoed this sentiment shortly thereafter to the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, when he said: ‘You can’t have a separate category that says, farmers are the special golden boys and girls. You end up saying the life of a white person is more important. You cannot do this.’19
The argument is therefore that farm attacks, as defined in the NRSS, are treated by the SAPS as simply being a manifestation of certain crimes that are already punishable by law, namely murder, assault, rape, armed robbery, etcetera. To develop a focused strategy would send a message that farmers are regarded as ‘special golden boys and girls’. Politically speaking, this might sound like a sound argument. However, speaking from a purely crime-prevention perspective, the argument is fallacious.
UNIQUE CRIMES REQUIRE UNIQUE COUNTER-STRATEGIES
It is not only a basic policing principle, but also basic common sense that unique crimes need to be dealt with by means of unique counter-strategies. The topic of dealing with unique crimes has also been widely written about.20 While it is not necessary to develop unique counter-strategies for every single type of crime, there are certain crimes that simply can never be proactively addressed and prevented if proper counter-strategies are not put in place. While the South African government largely ignores farm attacks and farm murders, the tragic irony is that this particular crime phenomenon can serve as the perfect example of a phenomenon that will never be prevented effectively if a unique counter-strategy is not in place. This is because the standard methods of operation of the SAPS simply cannot serve as a response, nor as a measure to prevent it.
This is in some contexts also referred to as situational crime prevention or risk-focused crime prevention. The choice of crime-prevention strategies is (or should be) based on empirical evidence about effective methods of tackling crime risk factors. ‘[I]t also depends on what are identified as the most pressing problems in the community,’ writes the American and British criminologists Brandon Welsh and David Farrington.21 The underlying principle here is that an evidence-based approach should be followed with regard to crime prevention. Crime prevention should be defined not by its intentions, but by its outcomes.22 These outcomes can be defined in a variety of different ways, including the number of criminal events and the number of criminal offenders. Other ways of measuring the consequences include the amount of harm inflicted, the number of victims harmed repeatedly, etcetera.
In order to achieve these outcomes, the most appropriate method of crime prevention must be developed. When dealing with a particular crime phenomenon that is unique in a variety of ways, it follows that this unique phenomenon could only be countered effectively by means of a unique counter-strategy. In some cases we find that these unique crimes also result in uniquely destructive consequences for society at large. This is where priority crimes come in. This is also, for example, the reason why the poaching of rhinos is not simply dealt with as normal poaching, but rather by a unique counter-strategy, backed by proper crime intelligence and sufficient resources. The same can be said of copper cable theft and of violence against women and children.
Broadly speaking, there are four reasons why farm attacks are different and why it requires a unique counter-strategy, namely:
The frequency with which these attacks occur;
The levels of brutality that often accompany these crimes;
The unique role that farmers play in society; and
The unique circumstances in which farmers live.
These reasons will each be dealt with in more detail in the chapters that follow.
Robert and Sue jumped upright in shock at what was happening. For a moment – only for a second – they looked at each other as they sat upright in their bed. Little did they know that this would be the last interaction between them. She shouted, ‘What do you want?’ Three people had climbed through the bedroom window. They did not bother to answer Sue’s question and immediately opened fire.
CHAPTER 3
Frequency: What are the numbers?
In my first year at university I took a course in criminology. One of the chapters of our textbook was on farm attacks. Our lecturer was a fairly young woman from Pretoria. At the commencement of the class, she asked us: ‘Who of you are from agricultural communities? Please raise your hands.’ I raised my hand, together with what seemed like a third of the class of a couple of hundred students. She continued: ‘Who of you, with your hands in the air, know someone who has been attacked or murdered on a farm?’ Almost no one lowered their hands. I was not surprised. The rest of the class, those who had their hands down prior to the second question, were utterly amazed, as was the lecturer.
Having grown up in an agricultural community – and one that is particularly plagued by farm attacks – I have noticed how, over time, people in farming communities have started to talk about a death by farm murder as if it were a death by natural causes. People would, sometimes casually, mention the fact that a person had been murdered on their farm as an incidental remark when something about that person was discussed during a social conversation, as if it was a natural cause of death.
The extent to which South African farmers are attacked and murdered is a matter of intense debate. Vastly different numbers are frequently posted on social media and a variety of calculations are made. Even when farm murders were finally discussed in Parliament in 2017, speakers from different political parties confidently provided contrasting statistics regarding the rate at which South African farmers are being murdered.1 This discrepancy is a direct result of the decision made by the Department of Police in 2007 that no further statistics should be released regarding farm murders.2 This confusion is, however, fuelled by an abundance of flawed calculations, based on flawed estimations of the true extent of the problem.
There are currently five main sources of data that include statistics on farm attacks and farm murders:
The 2003 Report of the Committee of Inquiry on Farm Attacks;
The SAPS Annual Reports for the years 2001/2002 to 2006/2007;
Individual reports and statements released by the South African Police Service(SAPS) in 2014, 2016 and 2017;
The data compiled by the Transvaal Agricultural Union of South Africa (TAU SA) and AfriForum; and
Data collected by the KwaZulu-Natal Agricultural Union (Kwanalu).
TAU SA has been collecting data since 1990. AfriForum started collecting data in 2013 and has since joined forces with TAU SA in collecting and verifying data on farm attacks.
The data released by Kwanalu was only for the province of KwaZulu-Natal and will therefore not be elaborated on in this chapter.
DATA RELEASED BY THE COMMITTEE OF INQUIRY INTO FARM ATTACKS IN 2003
In the report of the Committee of Inquiry on Farm Attacks, it is stated that in the year 1991 there were 327 farm attacks, which resulted in 66 farm murders. Ten years later, in 2001, a total of 1 011 farm attacks were committed, resulting in 147 farm murders.3 This amounts to an increase of 209% in farm attacks and an increase of 122% in farm murders.4 During these 11 years, 6 122 farm attacks and 1 254 farm murders were committed.5
DATA RELEASED BY THE SAPS FROM 2001 TO 2007
The SAPS started publishing data on farm attacks and farm murders in the financial year of 2001/2002 and did so for the six years that followed, until the release of statistics was summarily stopped.
This, despite the fact that the last report published by the SAPS in 2007 indicated a 25% upsurge in farm attacks just in that last year. (More on this in Chapter 17.)
Figure 1: SAPS data on farm attacks and farm murders: 2001/2002–2006/20076
From the numbers published for these six years, we can gather that:
A total of 587 farm murders were committed during 4 869 farm attacks.
On average 98 farm murders and 812 farm attacks were committed per year.
Out of every ten farm attacks, 1,2 farm murders were committed, or put differently: for every farm
murder, about 8,3 farm attacks were committed.
On average, there were about two farm murders every week and more than two farm attacks per day in the course of those six years.
DATA RELEASED BY THE SAPS IN 2014, 2016 AND 2017
In 2014, the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) hosted a National Investigative Hearing into Safety and Security Challenges in Farming Communities. The hearing was organised following a formal request by AfriForum to that effect. At the hearing, National Police Commissioner Riah Phiyega made available SAPS statistics on farm attacks and farm murders for the first time since 2007. The numbers provided were for the financial years of 2010/2011 to 2013/2014. According to Phiyega, a total of 2 227 farm attacks and 239 farm murders had been committed during those four years, averaging 557 farm attacks and 60 farm murders per year.
In May 2015 AfriForum formally requested the SAPS to release a detailed analysis of its statistics on farm attacks and farm murders. The request was ignored, and when all other options ran out, AfriForum took the matter to court. In February 2016, the High Court granted an order for the SAPS to provide AfriForum with such information within 30 days in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act.7 The SAPS did not comply with the court order within the prescribed time frame, effectively being in contempt of court. The information was finally provided on 6 May 2016.
The SAPS report that was issued to AfriForum explained that information with respect to farm attacks and farm murders was not maintained separately in the corporate systems of the SAPS, but in a ‘stand alone data base/manual data base’, according to the generally-accepted definition of a farm attack.8
Then, during a bilateral workshop between AfriForum and the SAPS several months later, the acting National Police Commissioner, Khomotso Phahlane, again disclosed official SAPS data on farm attacks and farm murders. These figures were a continuation of the figures disclosed to AfriForum in May 2016, but with the exclusion of the financial years of 1996/1997 to 2000/2001 and with the inclusion of the financial years of 2014/2015 and 2015/2016.
According to these figures, during the years of 2010/2011 to 2015/2016 a total of 3 074 farm attacks and 361 farm murders had been committed, amounting to an average of 512 farm attacks and 60 farm murders per year.
In October 2017, further statistics about farm attacks were released by the SAPS after a public outcry about the fact that these numbers had again been excluded from the annual crime statistics. In the financial year of 2016/2017, 638 farm attacks had taken place, resulting in 74 farm murders. According to this release, in the years of 1996/1997 to 2016/2017, no fewer than 12 245 farm attacks and 1 700 farm murders had been committed. This should be considered within the context of the fact that there are only roughly between 30 000 and 35 000 commercial farming units in South Africa (see analysis to follow). It should also be considered that all of the 1 700 people who were murdered were not necessarily commercial farmers, given that family members, visitors on the farm and farm workers can also be the victims of farm murders.
If we were to combine these numbers with the SAPS data for 2001/2002 to 2006/2007 that were available to us prior to the release of these statistics, a bigger picture starts to emerge.
Figure 2: SAPS data on farm attacks and farm murders: 1996/1997–2016/20179
Figure 2 provides an outline of the most complete statistics by the SAPS regarding farm attacks and farm murders available. Since the beginning of 2017, we have heard commentators stating that farm attacks and farm murders are on a downward slope. Those who state this do so with reference to these figures, without considering the data for the financial year of 2016/2017. When the figures released by the SAPS in October 2017 for the financial year of 2016/2017 are compared to the figures released in May 2016 for the financial year of 2015/2016, this amounts to a 43% increase in farm attacks and a 51% increase in farm murders in one year. However, in the statement released in October 2017, it was alleged that farm attacks had increased by 22,9% and farm murders by 27,5% in that year. It is unclear how these calculations were made.
If the reference by the SAPS to at least 12 245 farm attacks and 1 700 farm murders in 21 years is used, and if the three-year statistics gap – for which no statistics allegedly exist – is excluded, this would imply an average of 680 attacks and 94 farm murders per year, or 1,9 farm attacks per day and 1,8 farm murders per week. (The author is aware that these numbers do not correlate with the graph. The reference to 12 245 farm attacks and 1 700 farm murders was specifically provided by the SAPS. No explanation was given as to why these numbers are slightly higher than the total if the numbers for the respective years are added together.)
DATA RELEASED BY AFRIFORUM AND TAU SA
Given the fact that the annual release of statistics by the SAPS was discontinued in 2007, the only credible source since then was the data collected by TAU SA and AfriForum, until the release of statistics by Phiyega in 2014 and by Phahlane in 2016 and 2017.
In order to protect our own credibility at AfriForum, we only work with conservative numbers. It is often mentioned that more than 3 000 farmers have been murdered since 1994. There is, however, no factual basis for this statement and consequently it is a figure that we will not use, simply because we cannot verify that it is correct. Instead, our approach is to only use numbers of which the data were verified. The trouble with this approach, however, is that a ‘verified number’ implies that every single incident that builds up to create the total number has to be checked. While this is an enormous task, it has already been done to a large extent.
The book Land of Sorrow10 provides a detailed account of farm attacks and farm murders that took place between 1990 and 2012. AfriForum’s involvement with this project was to encourage people to report incidences of farm attacks,11 while the daunting task of verifying each and every case was taken on. Verification took place either by confirming the crime with the local police station, obtaining reports by credible media institutions about the incident, or by making contact with surviving victims or relatives of murdered victims. Every case that could not be verified was excluded. The result was an extremely credible, detailed list of incidents that ought to be referred to as a minimum number of the actual incidents. Ever since the publication of Land of Sorrow, AfriForum and TAU SA have continued keeping track of incidents, verifying these attacks and murders.
The numbers provided are only those that were brought to our attention and that could be verified. The reality surrounding this method dictates that there will be a discrepancy between the comprehensiveness of murder statistics, as opposed to attack statistics. The reason for this is that farm attacks where no murders are committed are rarely reported on in the media. These attacks occur so frequently that they are generally not regarded as remarkable anymore.
What reduces the available data on farm attacks even further is what we believe to be a growing trend of victims not reporting incidents to the SAPS. In some communities distrust in the SAPS has increased to such an extent that victims believe it to be a waste of time to report a crime. This happened particularly with the crime of assault. In 2012, 93,3% of assaults were reported to the SAPS. By 2016, it was down to 48,6%.12 This is largely the result of a decline in public confidence in the SAPS’s will and ability to do its job – a matter that will be explored in more detail in Chapter 21.
AfriForum has also experienced that many farm murders are not categorised as such. In other words, AfriForum has found cases where people were murdered during farm attacks, but where the incident was not reported by the police as a farm attack, resulting in the distortion of the statistics regarding these attacks. The extent to which under-reporting as a result of miscategorising transpires is unknown.
These realities imply that there may be large numbers of farm attacks that the world will never know about. The size of this ‘dark number’ is unknown, but its existence was confirmed repeatedly during research done by the AfriForum Research Institute (ANI). While conducting case studies across
the country, Lorraine Claasen, a researcher at AfriForum, was constantly informed by victims of other farm attacks that had taken place in their communities, and of which AfriForum was not even aware.
While we believe that the number of farm murders we have identified is close to the actual number (with our number being lower than the actual number), we are convinced that the actual number of farm attacks is much higher than that provided by the SAPS. Our numbers on farm attacks should be treated as conservative, or in other words, the ‘at least’ number.
If all the information gathered by TAU SA since 1990 is combined with that collected by both TAU SA and AfriForum since 2013, the graph in Figure 3 can be drawn.
According to this data, a total of 4 482 farm attacks and 1 933 farm murders have been verified by TAU SA, with the assistance of AfriForum and Kraal Uitgewers in recent years.
It is evident from the two data sets that the SAPS data on farm attacks are much higher, while the numbers for farm murders from both data sets are fairly similar.
The most important issue to address with regard to Figure 3 is why the graph indicates such a sharp increase in farm attacks from 2011 to 2017. There could be a variety of reasons for this.
Figure 3: TAU SA data on farm attacks and farm murders for 1990–201613
A major contributing factor to the sharp increase in farm attacks depicted on this graph could simply be the fact that AfriForum and TAU SA have become more efficient at collecting the data. Another factor could be that farm attacks had actually increased in these years. However, it should be pointed out that, while we are firmly convinced that the SAPS data on farm attacks are insufficient for the reasons already pointed out, the AfriForum and TAU SA data on farm attacks remain lower than that of the SAPS.