The selected financial year is highlighted only; the full World Bank population timeline remains visible. The 2024 Migration Data Portal / UN DESA figure is added as a contextual marker, not a second trend line.
Gold marker: 2024 international migrant stock, 2.6m / 4.1% of population. Context only — not offender-status data.
17 community-reported serious crime, FY2010/11-FY2024/25.
Indexed view: first comparable year = 100.
The selected category changes with the category filter; the date filter highlights rather than filters the chart.
A structural shift panel: property-related crime composite index versus commercial crime index. Full timeline remains visible; selected year is highlighted.
Cyan line: property-related composite index. Purple line: commercial crime index. Both indexed to first year = 100.
Do not infer offender nationality from geography. High counts in a province, city or station identify where crimes were recorded, not whether offenders were citizens, legal migrants or undocumented migrants.
International migrant stock is a population-context measure. It is not an illegal-immigration count and it is not an offender-status numerator.
Share of the selected crime dataset by crime category for the selected financial year. This chart uses the selected dataset as the controlled denominator.
Percentages are calculated within the selected crime dataset only. They do not represent offender nationality, immigration status or a share of all SAPS datasets.
Controlled denominator: the donut chart uses a specific selected Crime Dataset and selected Financial Year only. “All Crime Datasets” is restored as a table/filter view, but it is not summed into one headline total because the public SAPS structure contains both aggregate and component rows and a blind total across all datasets would risk double-counting.
For the default 17 Community-Reported Serious Crime view, the donut groups the selected dataset into broad community-reported families: Contact Crime, Contact-Related Crime, Property-Related Crime and Other Serious Crime. When All Crime Datasets is selected, the donut shows a safe empty state. The Annual Location Context - Provinces chart remains unchanged.
Searchable by year, dataset and category. This table is placed before the conclusion so users can inspect the evidence behind the intelligence finding.
| Financial Year | Population Year | Population | Crime Dataset | Crime Category | Recorded Count | YoY Count Change | Rate /100k | YoY % | Trend Assessment | Immigration Status Evidence |
|---|
FY2021/22 annual provincial counts for 17 community-reported serious crime from SAPS annual reporting.
Source note: Annual provincial panel uses FY2021/22 values available in the annual SAPS report. Location is not offender nationality.
| Panel Rank | Station | Province | Financial Year | Recorded Count | YoY Count Change | YoY % |
|---|
This is a financial-year station panel, not a quarterly Oct-Dec table. It uses the annual Top 30 station series available for FY2012/13-FY2021/22.
Migration Data Portal / UN DESA reports South Africa's 2024 international migrant stock as 2.6 million and 4.1% of population. This is context, not offender status.
Foreign actors are relevant to specific organised-crime markets, but they are not equivalent to immigrants generally.
Claim: Illegal immigrants commit most crime in South Africa.
Evidence status: Not established. SAPS public data lacks the offender-status numerator required to calculate legal or undocumented immigrant crime share.
Deeper attribution analysis is currently not possible from the public SAPS statistics because the dataset is collated and reported as administrative offence counts, not as offender-level or immigration-status records.
SAPS public crime statistics record what offences were reported or detected, where they were recorded, and how those counts changed over time. They do not currently publish the offender-status numerator needed to calculate claims such as immigrants, foreign nationals or undocumented migrants committing a specific share of national crime.
The available public evidence does not establish a direct statistical correlation between recorded crime in South Africa and legal or illegal immigration. The strongest evidence-supported position is that SAPS recorded-crime data can show offence, time and location patterns, while migration and organised-crime sources provide context. Foreign and undocumented actors appear in specific organised-crime markets, but current public data does not support treating legal or illegal immigration as the dominant measurable driver of national recorded crime.