South Africa sees two-thirds of murders going unsolved
The Peninsula
Johannesburg: About two in three murders in South Africa go unsolved due to insufficient evidence or leads, according to official figures released by...
Johannesburg: About two in three murders in South Africa go unsolved due to insufficient evidence or leads, according to official figures released by a governing party on Sunday.
Police closed without result more than 76,000 of the almost 115,000 murder cases that were recorded in the country between the financial year of 2018-2019 and December 2023, the data published by the centre-right Democratic Alliance (DA) shows.
The number was "strikingly high", said lawmaker Lisa Schickerling, the DA's deputy spokeswoman on police matters.
This was partially due to a shortage of trained detectives, itself a result of a lack of funding, she told AFP.
"The workload on the detectives is incredibly high. Most of them have between 350 and 500 cases each," Schickerling said. Murders are not the only crimes to go unsolved.
