About this site

This site was developed by Adrian Frith as a holiday project in December 2025. The code and data are available on GitHub.

Disclaimer and copyright

This site is not affiliated with the SA Police Service, Stats SA, any other government agency, or my employer. All information on this site is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind.

Neither SAPS nor Stats SA explicitly state terms of use for their data. In my view, this is public information that should be freely redistributable under the Promotion of Access to Information Act and section 32(1)(a) of the Constitution. To the extent that I have any claim to copyright or database right in respect of the work I have done to clean and organise the data, I relinquish any such rights and dedicate them to the public domain, in the terms set out in the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL) v1.0.

The code which powers this site is available under the MIT License.

Data sources

The crime statistics were extracted from the quarterly crime statistics spreadsheets available on the SAPS website. I retrieved older files which are no longer available on the SAPS website through the Wayback Machine. I wrote this script to unhide the hidden sheets in the spreadsheets which contain the raw data.

The boundaries of the police districts are from the police district shapefile published by Stats SA in August 2025. I used PostGIS to remove gaps and overlaps, and to slightly simplify the geometries.

The population counts were extracted from Stats SA's SuperWEB data portal.

I cleaned up some inconsistencies in the naming of police stations. For more details see the data repository.