License South Africa's crime data

Structured, officially-sourced SAPS crime statistics at police-precinct level, mapped to any suburb or address, available to license for insurers, proptech, and business-intelligence teams.

What you're actually licensing

SAPS publishes crime statistics at police-station level, not by suburb. Nobody can honestly claim raw suburb-level SAPS counts, because SAPS does not report at that resolution. What we license is the part SAPS doesn't provide: a maintained, confidence-graded suburb-to-precinct join, built from community-policing and SAPS sources and corrected against the official SAPS station-boundary data, Census sub-place geography, and cross-checked publication history.

That join, not the underlying SAPS numbers, is the product. The crime figures stay at police-station resolution, exactly as SAPS reports them; what the join gives you is the ability to resolve any suburb or address to the correct precinct, with a confidence grade, so you can attach official station-level figures to a property, a policy, or an address without guessing at the mapping yourself.

Coverage

provinces

~1,169

police precincts

~3,146

mapped suburbs

financial years

Annual SAPS crime-category totals per precinct, from 2013/14 onward (SAPS financial years, April–March). Each suburb-to-precinct mapping carries a confidence grade. See our full methodology for sourcing and known limitations.

Built for

Insurers

Precinct-level crime context, resolved to a property's suburb or address, for underwriting household and property risk.

Proptech & property portals

A licensed crime-data indicator to attach to listings, reports, or valuations.

Security & BI firms

Structured historical crime data for risk models and client-facing reporting.

What this is, and isn't

Available to license now, via a direct conversation with us. This is a partnership, not a self-serve signup.

Quarterly SAPS aggregates, not live or incident-level data. SAPS itself only publishes on this cadence.

Per-capita rates are published only for the 63 City of Cape Town precincts with precinct-level Census 2022 population data. Elsewhere only municipal-level population exists, which is not precise enough for an honest per-precinct rate — so we do not publish one there.

A self-serve API is in development. It is not live yet: this page is about the underlying dataset, licensable today through direct partnership.

How the licence works

The underlying crime figures are public. SAPS publishes them, and we don't claim ownership of them. What SafeSuburb builds and maintains — and what a licence covers — is the suburb-to-precinct mapping, the compiled and cleaned dataset, and the provenance grade on every join. That mapping is the hard part: police station areas are renamed and redrawn every few months, and nobody else keeps it current.

Some of it is already on this site, free to view. The per-page data you see while browsing is public, and you're welcome to read it, cite it, and link to it. What a commercial licence adds is the right to use the compiled dataset in a product or service, delivered as a structured feed with a maintained update cadence, the confidence grades under contract, and support — rather than scraped page by page.

Non-commercial and personal use of what's published here is free. Building a commercial product on the compiled dataset — an app, a report you sell, a risk model — is what the licence is for. If you're not sure which side of that line you're on, just ask; that's an easy conversation, not a gotcha.

Talk to us about licensing

Tell us about your use case. We'll get back to you with what's possible.