Mapping crime levels and court efficiency per magisterial district in South Africa

Abstract

South Africa is subdivided into provinces and each province is further subdivided into magisterial districts, the area of jurisdiction of a district court. South African Courts have a three-tier structure namely: district, regional and high court. The Department of Justice and Constitutional Development (DoJ) is planning to right-size the courts to promote service delivery and manage the budget. This is a project within the Justice Footprint Project, which is a project commissioned by the DoJ and managed by a consortium led by the CSIR Crime Prevention Centre. As part of this project, the CSIR mapped the crime levels and court statistics per magisterial district to determine the effectiveness of the criminal courts, and to establish if each court has enough resources to deal with its volume of criminal cases. To determine the crime levels per magisterial district, the police station precincts and magisterial boundaries were mapped and overlaid. This showed that in some instances the precincts and magisterial districts were not aligned with each other. For ease of analysis and to assign crime levels to magisterial districts, we assumed that the crime was distributed evenly over each precinct and the percentage of the precinct in each magisterial district was calculated. These portions wer represented in a matrix whose cell values ranged between zero (0) [not present in a magisterial district] and one (1) [completely within a magisterial district]. Using statistical software, crime data from the South African Police Service (SAPS) were reclassified into the six major categories used by DoJ, and the crime levels per magisterial district were calculated, imported into a Geographic Information System (GIS) and mapped per magisterial district. By mapping crime categories such as secual offences, it is possible to identify magisterial districts with high occurrences of these crimes, and hence districts that need courts specializing in sexual offences.