Originally Posted by Pablo

Piccolo, don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to make that idiotic argument that there is murder everywhere and therefore everything in SA is just fine and dandy.

I don't know what the murder stats are for the UK, but you can be pretty sure that there were not 19,824 murders in the UK (as in those recent SA stats I quoted earlier). I suppose I should have said that a murder a week is a *relative* rarety - when compared with SA, that is.

Nor am I saying - of course - that there are no burglaries etc in the UK. Certainly there are. It's just that my own personal statistics, as it were, are that I do not know anyone - any friend of mine, that is - who has been a victim of violent crime or even burgled. In SA, on the other hand, I myself was held up at gunpoint during a raid on a post office (Auckland Park), made to lie on the floor, robbed of any valuables, and was lucky not to have been shot.

And I can only think of *one* friend in SA who hasn't been burgled or attacked in some way... and even in that one person's case her brother has been hijacked 3 times. And on it goes. I could go on, but you get the picture.

After my own little incident in Auckland Park, I have never bought myself anything but the cheapest watch again (I had my watch taken, among other stuff). No big deal, luckily for me. Feeling the gun pointed at my head as I lay on the floor wasn't much fun, though. When I think of what it must do to a person/family when a member is raped/murdered etc I can scarcely imagine how they ever manage to get over it. (To be honest, I don't think you do ever "get over" something like that).

It's so easy to downplay crime when it's just a number.

The wider context of the figures I quoted earlier (and I can post the rest if you're interested) is that police numbers are hopelessly down in SA, especially where they're needed most, in Gauteng and the Cape. I feel that the SA government has been more interested in playing racial quota games with the SA police than trying to create or maintain and effective anti-crime force.

Pablo

Originally Posted by snowbunny

My brother has just returned from two weeks in SA. He didn't report any of the horrifying things described; but did note, of course, the shantytowns, and the fact that many houses have gates all the way round. His feeling was that property crime was higher than violent crime.

Originally Posted by izibear

If you have a home invasion over there, a fairly common occurence, you will most likely get raped/tortured, and shot at, if not murdered.

Originally Posted by stormer

What a pile of paranoid crap.

Originally Posted by Piccolo

Wondered where you were Stormer.! Let's face you and Izibear never going to agree.

Cannot reaally see thieves buying into gated compounds. After all once you have stole the goods what would be the point!

Originally Posted by izibear

Piccolo. I should have phrased that, 'moving into walled compounds]. There have been reports in the S.A. media that this is a new trend.

As to Stormer, the king of denial, what can I say. Paranoid crap se voet. If it was paranoid crap, then huge numbers of South African homes, nearly all in Johannesburg in fact, and many in Cape Town too, wouldn't have steel gates between their living areas and their bedroom areas in addition to all the other security they already have.

Found an interesting report come out of UCT, online re: Observatory, the one in C.T. not the one in Joeys which might shed some light to those who have never lived in S.A.

http://www.africanstudies.uct.ac.za/...bservatory.pdf

Originally Posted by Piccolo

I will try to find the newspaper article about how communities
themselves can cope with and change social problems. It was about inner cities in the States.

Originally Posted by Pablo

I suspect there's a limit to what "communities" can do in the absence of competent government.

Judging from the number of black Africans I see around the UK lately, I suspect they're voting with their feet, just like the white and Indian Africans.

Pablo

Originally Posted by stormer

What a pile of paranoid crap.

Originally Posted by Piccolo

Wondered where you were Stormer.! Let's face you and Izibear never going to agree.

Cannot reaally see thieves buying into gated compounds. After all once you have stole the goods what would be the point!

Originally Posted by G'Day

Piccolo I think what Izibear meant was more in the line of the following... my friend had a very well protected house. She worked for a hi-tech security company and had an anti-theft system that was absolutely state of the art - cateyes, motion sensors, the works. She came home one night, five months pregnant and tired, to find some men waiting for her in her house. They'd already stolen everything, but they knew she was single, female and they wanted to have some "fun" before leaving. They left her HIV positive and killed her baby. They didn't even bother to hurry, because they were sure in the knowledge that the police would not respond. And they didn't. My friend's elderly neighbour could hear her scream the whole night long as she was beaten and repeatedly raped. He called the police several times, but they never came out to assist her. The next day, after the men had left she called her sister who took her to hospital where she was told the beatings had severed the placenta from the womb and her baby had died. As she came to after theatre a policeman had the audacity to come up to her and ask her for her statement!

Where do you think they got her security code to disable her system? Her alarm was never triggered, in fact they got through her whole security system using HER passwords and security keys. Where did they get these?

The security firm investigated the breach in security, naturally. They found that someone inside the company was selling clients' details to a crime syndicate. The clients they had were mostly the kind of people who could buy a whole lot of security and who needed it.

This is what I think Izabear meant by "buying into". You don't need to buy the entire complex, just one greedy pig in the security firm that services the complex is all you need.

Originally Posted by sa2oz

She returned to where they were staying in a secure complex.10 ft palasade with gate and 24 hr security to find the washing stolen.

Originally Posted by Pablo

Dear God! that is truly appalling. I suspect, when something like this happens to "stormer" or his family.Pablo