State of Crime & Safety
Micro Guide
The State of Crime and Safety dashboard presents crime data across two pages: Crime by Type and Crime by Category. Together they show the overall scale of crime, the types of crimes most frequently reported and how these patterns change over time and across geography.
Note: The analysis below refers to the following filters applied on both pages: Gauteng (Province); City of Johannesburg (District); City of Johannesburg (Municipality); 2025 (Year). The insights therefore reflect crime patterns for the City of Johannesburg in 2025. The analysis is intended to guide interpretation rather than provide a complete account of all crime dynamics.
The doughnut chart shows 258 676 total reported crimes, indicating the overall scale of crime within the City of Johannesburg.
The crimes are grouped into three broad categories:
The distribution shows that property-related and other serious crimes, alongside contact crimes, make up the largest share of reported offences. The pattern of crime in Johannesburg reflects a multi-dimensional set of pressures, comprising both personal safety concerns which manifest in contact crimes, as well as economic or opportunistic behaviour that is evident in property-related offences.
For planners, this highlights that crime cannot be attributed to any single cause but rather emerges from the convergence of social vulnerability, economic conditions, and spatial and environmental factors.
The time-series chart shows fluctuations in crime levels across categories over several years.
A notable dip around 2020 – 2021 is visible, followed by a gradual recovery and stabilisation in subsequent years. The dip aligns with COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, when movement and economic activity were limited. The subsequent rise suggests a return to pre-pandemic activity levels rather than a structural shift in crime patterns.
For planners, this highlights that crime trends must be read alongside broader social and economic conditions, not in isolation.
The chart records 50 981 contact crimes in Johannesburg. The key contributors include:
The dominance of assault and hijacking reflects the intersection of everyday interpersonal conflict, economic stress and vulnerabilities within public safety environments. Contact crimes are particularly significant in this context, as they directly shape perceptions of safety and carry broader implications for quality of life and community stability.
This category reports 27 564 crimes, with the main contributors including:
Drug-related offences appear to dominate this category. These crimes are highly influenced by policing activity. The high numbers may indicate stronger law enforcement and targeted policing strategies.
For planners, this category reflects where enforcement is concentrated, rather than purely underlying social conditions.
This category shows 48 362 crimes. The main contributors include:
The prevalence of theft and burglary suggests strong underlying links between economic pressure, urban density and the movement and activity patterns characteristic of dense city environments. These offences tend to concentrate in commercial zones, transport corridors and high-traffic areas, precisely where opportunity and vulnerability converge.
From an economic growth perspective, this is consequential: property crime has the capacity to erode investment decisions, undermine business confidence and diminish urban vitality over time.
The dashboard allows users to select specific crime categories. For example, under the crime category of arson, there are 121 reported cases, with 17 classified as community-reported serious crimes.
In 2025, the City of Johannesburg recorded 121 reported cases of arson, a significantly higher figure than that of other municipalities within Gauteng, pointing to distinct urban conditions that drive and sustain elevated arson levels within this specific municipality.
Although arson constitutes a small proportion of total crime, its spatial concentration carries analytical significance. Where it clusters, it may signal localised risk conditions or specific environmental and settlement vulnerabilities, whether in the form of informal settlement fires, land or property disputes, or industrial and waste-related incidents. The analytical value of examining arson spatially lies not in its overall volume, but in its capacity to surface discrete, place-based risks that broader crime statistics would otherwise obscure.
The crime and safety dashboard shows what crimes are occurring, how frequently and how they change over time. However, these patterns rarely exist in isolation. What you are seeing is not just crime, but rather an interaction between population pressures, economic conditions, spatial inequality and infrastructure and service distribution.
To deepen the analysis, users can connect these indicators to other NSH dashboards.
The analysis in this section is intended to guide interpretation rather than provide a complete account of all crime dynamics.
Note: Where you are directed to open a separate dashboard for comparison purposes, it is important to ensure that preferred filters are applied at the top of each dashboard before proceeding with analysis. Should you wish to continue examining the data in line with the example outlined in the previous section, filters for each dashboard opened must be set to Gauteng, City of Johannesburg and 2025 where applicable, as these selections will not carry over automatically between views.
Start by asking:
Rapid urban growth can create pressure on housing, transport systems, employment opportunities, and public infrastructure. These pressures sometimes contribute to increases in certain types of crime.
Open the State of Population dashboard, look for population growth trends, population density changes, age distribution and sex ratios.
Questions to consider:
Start by asking:
Property crimes such as theft and burglary often correlate with income inequality, unemployment, and economic vulnerability.
Open the State of Deprivation dashboard, look for spatial patterns of inequality and multidimensional deprivation levels.
Questions to consider:
Start by asking:
Open the State of Education dashboard, look for school completion and matric pass rates; Bachelor or diploma pass rates; participation in early childhood development (ECD) programmes; and education participation among youth and young adults.
Questions to consider:
Start by asking:
Neighbourhoods that lack accessible services – such as schools, clinics, libraries, or policing facilities – often experience different social and spatial dynamics than areas where these amenities are well distributed. The presence or absence of these facilities can shape how people move through spaces, where activity concentrates, and how safe communities feel.
Open the State of Social Amenities dashboard.
Look for indicators relating to availability and levels of amenities such as:
These indicators help reveal where public infrastructure and community services may be under-resourced. To interrogate where these amenities are physically located, municipalities could look towards datasets from their relevant sector departments to obtain a spatialised amenities dataset, where amenities have geolocations, to enable this analysis at a neighbourhood level.
Questions to consider:
Crime data is not only relevant for policing strategies. It has direct implications for how cities and municipalities are planned.
For planners, these insights can inform decisions such as:
locating public facilities and transport hubs
improving street lighting and urban design
prioritising precinct revitalisation projects
designing safe pedestrian routes and public spaces
supporting economic recovery in high-crime areas
The dashboard also highlights how crime interacts with broader development patterns. High levels of property crime may align with areas experiencing economic pressure, while contact crime patterns may intersect with deprivation and population density.
When combined with insights from other NSH dashboards, crime data becomes a tool for understanding how underlying conditions shape community safety. It allows planners to move beyond the question, “how much is crime happening?”, towards a more strategic question, “what conditions in this municipality are shaping safety outcomes, and how can planning interventions help address them?”.
To deepen the analysis, planners may consider combining dashboard insights with other datasets, including:
