South Africa's Crime Rate 4x The Global Average

I was watching some piece on Oscar Pistorius and that's what they said about his home country. Is that actually true? I've never been there. That rate sounds as if there would have to be dead bodies strewn out all over the street.

• I'm curious about this too.

• If this is true, it is very sad. Will just reinforce the racists.

• There's a "global average" crime rate? So they compare war zones and failed states with Nordic countries and average it all out? That makes a lot of sense.

  Fox News

• The British ruin everything.

• R2, read your history. In reality, it hardly reinforces racists.

• I know tons of south africans, white and black. They are all very saddened but realistic about this. All wish that it would change.

• It's a beautiful but profoundly dangerous place. 12 foot razor wire fences around middle-class residences are the norm.

• Oppressing people for centuries rarely turns out well for anyone.

• I thought it was common knowledge. SA used to place first as the murder capital of the world. Now it's just the rape capital of the world. As r7 said, it's beautiful but has always been a violent region. Women are advised to never travel alone unless being raped is in their itinerary.

• There was a gruesome story I read this week. With video I chose not to watch. It was SA police tying a cab driver to the back bumper of a paddy wagon. They then dragged him for miles. Amazingly the man survived. They took him to a jail,where they beat him to death. It seems that is the end of it? This was either in Huff. Po. Or Daily beast. Why don't the "good Christians" get themselves into a lather about this kind of thing,instead of trying to stop people who love each other from getting married?

  A%20lamb

• Another fake story intended to show South Africa in a bad light. Wake up, morons. It's Brit-American neocons and S.A. white supremacists who blanket us with these fake stories.

• They are not "fake" stories - Johannesburg, white enclaves aside, makes the West Side of Chicago, Anacostia (DC), and Bed-Stuy (NYC) look like Sunnybrook Farm in comparison.

• R8, India has an equally long history of colonization and oppression, minus the ridiculous violence. Sure, India does have crime, but by and large, you don't fear for your life in most cities.

• It's worse than the Middle East?

• It's a pity because Johannesburg seems quite cosmopolitan and interesting to visit, and the country has tons of natural beauty, but as long as stories like the one below keep happening, no way would I travel there.

  http://tinyurl.com/c7pe3b9

• [R11] , people filmed the first beating,and the part where the cab driver was cuffed to the official police vehicle and dragged FOR MILES !! I don't know how to link,or I would! The videos were from people's cell phones. Google it.

  A%20Lamb

• Fuck PISS-torius and Fuck South Africa, one couldn't give a rat's ass about either of them.

  Boobie Luebcke

• The cad driver/victim's name was Mido Macia. Eight SA police officers are charged with his murder! First story in Huffpo,was February 28. I Googled ,cab driver dragged,beaten,south African police.

  A%20Lamb

• I wonder how the Johannesburg crime rate compares with Rio.

• There hasn't been apartheid for 20 years. How long do you think it will take for the country to repair itself? Is the crime a result of the poor economy?

• Let's put it this way, R20, the violence and crime started right after apartheid ended. A man started a company which made flame throwers attached to the undercarriage of cars like BMWs so the wouldn't be carjacked on the road. A guy tries your door, you push a button, and whoosh, crispy criminal.

  http://youtu.be/fDrzMGdYWZc

• A friend was offered a temporary job there. And also, a driver to take him to work and home, it is that dangerous there.

• There are tons of white South African professionals in my community (e.g., doctors, lawyers, dentists, teachers). They have all fled SA and immigrated in the last 10 years due to increasing class and racial violence. For the future of SA look to nearby countries like Zimbabwe where all of the white citizens have fled (along with their capital) and the economy has imploded. Mandela can talk about the "rainbow nation" all he wants, but the reality is that whites are fleeing that country in droves.

• I would really LOVE it if Angelina & Brad moved there. Most of their fans are black illiterates. Go for it Brangelina, do the fauxmanitarian thing & put your feet where your big fat mouths are.

• (R23) Mandela was an excellent leader and meant what he said. Unfortunately SA hasn't had a good leader since Mandela. It's a very corrupt and lawless place.

• r13 I guess you missed that story from India about that girl that was gang raped and beaten on a city bus. She was with her boyfriend whom the attackers beat. They beat her and gang raped/sodomized her then threw her off the bus. This is a growing thing in India, attacks on women.

• R26, I missed nothing. Walk down the street in Calcutta at 10 p.m. and walk down the street in Johannesburg and then get back to me about which is safer.

• You miss quite a bit, R27. Obviously.

• What I don't *miss* is the stupidity of idiots who think South Africa and India have similar levels of violence, or that because of the India rape case, that makes them on par. Sorry for those of you with deluded agendas; I've been to India (and Latin America) and never felt like my life was in danger. But South Africa? No thanks.

• Your experiences mean very little to us, R29. Why would they? Your use of false equivalency and apparent lack of historical knowledge make you just one more ignorant bigot. Get back to us when you've read a book or two.

• Mrs. Mandela says South Africa is an angry nation on the brink.

  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/southafrica/9916310/South-Africa-is-an-angry-nation-on-the-brink-warns-Nelson-Mandelas-wife.html

• Yeah. On the other hand, the media is being irresponsible in portraying South Africa as some big wasteland of crime. After all, that makes for better news copy for the Oscar P. story, right?

  http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/amanda-willard/pistorius-south-africa-media-murdering-image_b_2775257.html%3Futm_hp_ref%3Dfb%26src%3Dsp%26comm_ref%3Dfalse

• Chickens are roosting, R31.

• How is Capetown? Is that a safe place?

  Putting%20my%20travel%20agent%20on%20hold%20for%20a%20minute

• Blacks worldwide are incapable of sustaining civilized societies, and countries such as South Africa prove this. The bible talks extensively on how the Lord put blacks on earth to be beasts of burden for the rest of the world and that's the way it should be.

• [quote][R13] I guess you missed that story from India about that girl that was gang raped and beaten on a city bus. She was with her boyfriend whom the attackers beat. They beat her and gang raped/sodomized her then threw her off the bus. This is a growing thing in India, attacks on women. Women aren't attacked in other countries? You sound very uneducated.

• R30, you are an uneducated moron with an obvious agenda; trying to pass off South Africa's history of apartheid (which is shameful) as an excuse for the atrocities being committed in that nation today. Sorry, I don't believe the levels of rape, murder and homophobic violence in that country as excusable. I'm sorry that you think thugs boiling a 12 y/o boy alive in scalding water is OK, but that's more your problem than mine.

• No one said anything about excuses. Read a book, deal. Not necessarily in that order.

  R30

• There is less violence in South Africa GENERALLY than in the USA. It is a violent country compared to Canada and Australia, but not compared to say the USA, Mexico, Peru, or Brazil. The compounds with the barbed wire were a legacy of race war fears of the 1980s and are not the result of current conditions. During apartheid (and before), whites in South Africa enjoyed a first world economy with a large exploited urban mass below. But the big story of the country was that large areas, called bantustans, had had no development into the cash economy at all, and were still under the rule of feudal leaders with a Middle Ages agenda. These were places with no roads, no schools, no stores, nothing. Transkei at one point had a per capita income half of Haiti's...and that's poor. So when you look at S.A. and say, oh it has high unemployment, the wonder is that it works as well as it does since most people in the country have never received a wage. They also don't count self-employed people as employed and that is the very essence of a traditional economy. Since majority rule housing has been built for twenty million people. If they had done nothing else, that would have already made the country a success.