Home Invasioin

1

Tackling crime cleverly

Drive through any city in South Africa and you cannot help noticing the vast array of signs proclaiming alarm systems and armed patrols, together with the rampart-like walls, the electrified fences and lights, and the snarling guard dog signs – all attesting to a nation battling to cope with a very high rate of violent crime.

People in their homes ought to have greater control over their lives than they do anywhere else, but in South Africa most people do not feel safe at home. Unlike burglaries, in which goods are stolen while no one is present, house robberies – as the term is defined by the South African Police Service (SAPS) – are deliberately planned to take place when residents are home. This form of intrusion is in many ways more traumatic than any other type of crime. It shatters the sense of privacy, control and security that people should feel in their own homes.

Official police service statistics show that in the majority of South African house robbery cases the victims are overpowered and threatened with violence.[1] In some robberies householders are tortured, beaten, physically intimidated and verbally abused. On a daily basis South African media carry reports and graphic descriptions of violent crime, including house robberies. The unpredictability and prevalence of criminal attacks at homes make for extreme levels of insecurity.

Adding to the insecurity is the fact that police success rates are very low when it comes to solving and prosecuting cases of violent crime. To give an indication, the South African Law Commission published a report in 2000 on the progress, outcome, and conviction rates of a representative sample of crimes reported to the police. The sample of 15 529 cases covered five categories of crime that had been reported in eight police areas across the country. More than two years after the crimes had been reported, the Law Commission analysed the outcomes of the cases.[2] It was found that 88,7 percent of reported ‘robbery with aggravating circumstances’ cases did not reach court.[3] In addition, only one out of ten reported robberies involving a dangerous weapon had been brought to court after two years.[4] The researchers’ conclusion: ‘Crime pays, since South African criminals, even violent criminals, tend to get away with their crimes’.[5]

Similarly, an Institute for Security Studies (ISS) report found that very few of the crimes reported to the police resulted in an arrest or conviction, and that many cases were withdrawn because of insufficient evidence. The ISS study showed that only 12,5 percent of cases of robbery with aggravating circumstances actually ended up on the desks of state prosecutors.[6]

This book describes in detail the methods used by house robbers. My hope, in sharing this information, is to help the police achieve a more effective rate of arrests, and to assist householders to improve their home security and safeguard their lives in the event of a violent robbery. The 30 people whom I interviewed during my research – the interviews were conducted in 2006-07[7] – were active participants in house robberies who were serving sentences for this crime. Because of the geographical distribution of prisons and the logistical problems of visiting them, I limited the interviews for the study to correctional centres in Gauteng Province, where more than half of the serious violent crimes in South Africa are committed.

I also wanted to establish whether interviews with convicted and incarcerated criminals were a valuable source of information for crime intelligence purposes. My findings in this study and in a previous one that I conducted on car hijackers, as well as my own experience in the police service, have convinced me that information obtained from incarcerated offenders and the resulting crime intelligence are invaluable in police work. In this book I suggest how such information can be systematically incorporated into the South African policing approach.

My own background and previous research experience have some relevance. I was a detective in the SAPS during the 1980s and a member of a special investigation unit[8] that focused mainly on violent crimes. This book is an adaptation of my doctoral research into house robberies and in some ways it builds on the research I did for my master’s degree, where I looked into motor vehicle hijacking. I established that vehicle hijackers tended to progress from lesser crimes to more serious ones as their experience and knowledge of crime increased.[9] This made me interested in scientifically researching whether a similar progression also held true for house robbers.

My belief in the effectiveness of crime intelligence grew through my interaction with two previous police commissioners of the Metropolitan Police Service, London, Lord Paul Condon and later Lord (Dr) John Stevens. I was very fortunate, through my friendship with these two commissioners, to be given open access to the police training facilities in the United Kingdom as well as access to their training material and research data. I was also fortunate to have been given the opportunity to undertake a study tour of most of the police training facilities in several countries in Europe. All this was put to good use when I did my research in South Africa.

For obvious reasons, any person who has been arrested will offer investigation officers or prosecutors as little information as possible about their criminal activities and associates. However, once they have been convicted and put behind bars, they have much less to lose. I wanted to find out if crime intelligence derived from interviews with house robbers could be used to combat these types of robberies. Apart from its use in the prevention and investigation of crime, the intelligence could be used to prevent convicted criminals from returning to crime and provide useful information for the management of correctional centres.

Internationally, and especially in the case of the more successful police services such as the London Metropolitan Police Service, jailed offenders are used as a source of crime information as a matter of course. However, in South Africa, no official instructions or practices exist to debrief offenders once they have been convicted, either in the police service or the prison system.[10] While it not realistic to debrief all those who have been convicted, incarcerated criminals are nevertheless an easily traceable and accessible source of information for the police and the Department of Correctional Services.[11] Yet this valuable source of information remains untapped.

The role of crime intelligence in preventing crime

Modern crime-combating strategies place great emphasis on the prevention of crime. This has unfortunately placed unrealistic expectations on the police service, which cannot single-handedly prevent crime, despite its central role in law enforcement, maintaining of order, investigation and visible policing.[12]

While the investigation of crimes and prosecution of offenders may not be enough to combat South Africa’s exceptionally high levels of crime, the gathering and analysis of crime information are of cardinal value in formulating crime intelligence.[13] Intelligence-led interventions can be reactive, meaning used in investigating a particular crime that has occurred, or proactive, meaning taking measures to prevent criminal behaviour that is likely to occur. In the proactive approach, which is already established in several countries, rather than starting inquiries into a specific offence after it has been committed, the police target ‘known’ offenders who are likely to commit future crimes. Such investigations are becoming normal practice.

Proactive policing is strengthened by the multi-agency approach, also known as ‘partnership policing’. In this form of policing the police, the public, elected officials, government, business and other agencies all work together to address community safety.[14] More and more support is currently being given to this approach in South Africa, so that the police and all state departments, including the Department of Correctional Services, work with a responsible public to make communities safe places to live.

In this respect the Department of Correctional Services can make an important contribution by using convicted inmates as a source of crime intelligence. As a visiting American expert, Prof. Jess Maghan, stated at a conference in South Africa:

The correctional environment, as a source of information and production of intelligence useful to law enforcement, remains an essentially untapped domain. It is timely to develop areas for intelligence collaboration between law enforcement and correctional agencies. There is a need to get out of old territorial perspectives and talk about sharing intelligence resources.[15]

South Africa’s high crime rate places the police service under tremendous daily pressure as police officers attend to large volumes of complaints and investigate many crime scenes. There is further pressure from the demands of the public and the media, who expect the police to ‘do something’ about the high crime rate. The weight of expectations, the low levels of support for the police, and the unprecedented crime levels have resulted in the perpetuation of a policing style that remains largely reactive, and aspires to uphold law and order at any cost. This means that planning and response are at best ad hoc and the approach tends to be one of crisis management.

Investigating high numbers of crimes makes excessive demands on crime investigators. They first have to determine whether a crime has in fact been committed, then they must establish the identity of the suspects, and then prove that their actions were illegal and criminal. Clearly the investigator must be in a position to make use of every potential source of information that could shed light on the case.[16] To enable follow-through on any criminal act, information relating to the crime needs to be properly collected, recorded, collated, analysed, interpreted, verified and processed so that it is usable as crime intelligence.

In other countries the proactive intelligence-driven style has proven to be effective. Researchers[17] and the police themselves[18] have found that relatively few people are responsible for the perpetration of a high proportion of crimes. Researchers describe this as the 20/80 principle, meaning that 20 percent of the population is usually responsible for committing 80 percent of the crime. In the United States this has given rise to Repeat Offender Projects, which identify criminals and arrest those who are responsible for a large number of crimes. The identification is carried out using crime intelligence compiled from crime information derived from all available sources, including sentenced and incarcerated offenders.

Internationally, it is routine for convicted and incarcerated offenders to be debriefed, for example, by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States and the London Metropolitan Police Service in the United Kingdom. Robbers are part of the crime ‘underworld’ and therefore are very knowledgeable on a wide range of crime issues. This wealth of information is, however, not being fully utilised in South Africa as there is no similar formal (let alone integrated, co-operative inter-agency) programme to obtain, collect, collate and analyse crime information from inmates.

While in recent years the South African Police Service has introduced crime intelligence-led operations, as yet this method has not been fully adopted by police detectives.[19] However, some branches of the SAPS have launched campaigns based on crime intelligence. These include the searching of entire neighbourhoods, such as Hillbrow in Johannesburg, and forming task teams to deal with specific crime issues. These intelligence-based initiatives have achieved some success. Examples include an 85 percent decrease in truck hijacking between 1998/99 and 2004/05 and a 22 percent reduction in motor vehicle hijacking between 2001/02 and 2004/05.[20]

For house robbery, however, the police service still relies solely on the more traditional sources of crime information, such as the computerised crime-reporting system and information obtained from informers. Crime intelligence derived in this way lacks insight into the reasoning and motivation that lies behind the modus operandi of the offenders. It fails to provide answers to questions such as why robbers select a specific target house, how they hide or dispose of stolen goods or weapons, or why they commit the crime in the first place.

This book is a first step towards answering some of these questions. Much of the information shared here could not have been obtained from any other source but the house robbers themselves. It includes their personal motives, details on how they plan their crimes, their relationships with crime associates, and their crime preferences.

For instance, it became clear from the face-to-face interviews that the house robbers would consider burgling premises where nobody was at home but they generally preferred to conduct a robbery when residents were home. This was because they were then less likely to be surprised and had more control over the residents and the premises. They could force residents to de-activate alarms and give them access to safes, and make them to quickly point out where valuables such as expensive jewellery is kept or hidden. They can also tie residents up and/or lock them up to prevent communication with police or armed response units.

The fact that the overwhelming majority of respondents, most of whom did not know each other, concurred about the crime information they provided, makes for a high probability that the information they provided was true and accurate. It correlates with media news reports by victims of house robberies on what transpired during the robbery. It is also confirmed by my own police detective experience in investigating many cases of house robbery.

Subsequent to concluding my study and handing a copy of the report to the police service’s crime intelligence unit, I was informed that this unit had conducted a case docket analysis of a thousand house robberies reported to the police in 2008/09. At the time, neither myself nor the members of the SAPS who conducted the case docket analysis were aware of each other’s research. The SAPS members compared the findings of their study and mine, and informed me that the findings concurred. (The police’s study was limited to the quantitative information contained in the case files.)

The robbers in my study had each carried out an average of 40 burglaries and four other house robberies by the time they were arrested. They also admitted to and provided information on a range of other crimes they had committed for which they have not been prosecuted. I gave all the jailed house robbers I interviewed a written undertaking that I would not to reveal their identities either directly or indirectly. However, there was an ethical, legal and moral consideration that I needed to resolve. In the course of disclosing information about crimes they had committed, the respondents might also give away information that could lead to the arrest of other suspects. I overcame the dilemma by gathering the information in such a way that nobody had to mention any names or addresses.

Finally, the house robbers provide valuable advice on how householders can more effectively avoid becoming robbery victims; and in the event of a robbery, what actions residents can take to minimise the chances of being injured or killed.

2

How house robberies are planned

Very few house robberies are done on the spur of the moment. The robbers explained that house robbery is