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Law enforcement and crime

Law enforcement in South Africa is primarily the responsibility of the South African Police Service (SAPS), South Africa's national police force. SAPS is responsible for investigating crime and security throughout the country. The South African Police Service has over 1,154 police stations across the country and over 150,950 officers. In 2023 the Special Task Force (SAPS) placed 9th at the international SWAT competition out of 55 law enforcement teams from across the world making it the best in Africa.

South Africa has the world's largest private security industry, with over 10,380 private security companies and 2.5 million private security personnel of which over 556,000 are active, making it bigger than the South African Police Force and Military combined. Private security mainly provide assistance to the South African Police Service (SAPS) to combat crime throughout the country. Over the years there has been tremendous growth in the private security industry.

As of February 2023, South Africa has the sixth highest crime rate in the world. From April 2017 to March 2018, on average 57 murders were committed each day in South Africa. In the year ended March 2017, there were 20,336 murders and the murder rate was 35.9 per 100,000 – over five times higher than the global average of 6.2 per 100,000. More than 526,000 South Africans were murdered from 1994 to 2019.

South Africa has a high rape rate, with 43,195 rapes reported in 2014/15, and an unknown number of sexual assaults going unreported. A 2009 survey of 1,738 men in KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape by the Medical Research Council found one in four men admitted to raping someone, and another survey of 4,000 women in Johannesburg by CIET Africa found one in three said they had been raped in the past year. Rape occurs most commonly within relationships, but many men and women say that rape cannot occur in relationships; however, one in four women reported having been abused by an intimate partner. Rapes are also perpetrated by children (some as young as ten). The incidence of child and infant rape is among the highest in the world, largely as a result of the virgin cleansing myth, and a number of high-profile cases (sometimes as young as eight months) have outraged the nation.

Between 1994 and 2018, there were more than 500 xenophobic attacks against foreigners in South Africa. The 2019 Johannesburg riots were similar in nature and origin to the 2008 xenophobic riots that also occurred in Johannesburg.