REBOOT NEWS SA
Rebooting South Africa as a destination
Given the current travel restrictions in place for international travel, inwards and outwards, imposed on South Africa and the impact that this is having on the tourism and related sectors, a recent newspaper headline “6 SA cities make top 20 list of the most dangerous cities in the world” (Independent on Saturday, 6 February 2021) garnered attention. By Peter Bagshawe
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he data set was released by numbero.com which is a Serbian-based online database being, apparently, the world’s largest source of user contributed information that provides reports on consumer pricing, crime rates and health care quality, amongst others. The database and its model have been criticised in that it relies on individual input and there is no third party audit on information received. Despite this, the main point of interest is that the information represents an overview of the risk as perceived by residents of a particular location at the time of completion of a standardised survey. As a balancing factor, data is retained for statistical purposes for up to 36 months in
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respect of any location. In the numbero.com rating on 431 cities listed in the review there was a tight South African cluster that had Pretoria in third place, followed by Durban in fourth place and Johannesburg in fifth place. Further down the listing, Pietermaritzburg came in seventh place, Port Elizabeth at fourteenth and Cape Town placed nineteenth. The survey questions are not available for review but it is again emphasised that the results reflect the response of individuals living in the cities surveyed and, although probably subjective, reflect a living-in-it situation. The norm is to base crime rates attributable to cities by available, accurate reported statistics, including cities with
more than 300,000 residents and for the statistics to be linked to an annual period. The easiest crime to use – murder – in that the definition of the crime, remains similar internationally. Working from here, Wikipedia provides a listing of fifty cities by murder rate that shows that 46 cities are in the Americas and four are in South Africa. The data in the Wikipedia list is for the calendar year 2019 but, given that 2020 was the year of lockdown, to lesser and greater extents internationally, the use of the data for current purposes is justified. In the Wikipedia listing, Cape Town is ranked at fourth, Nelson Mandela Bay at 24th, Durban at 35th and Johannesburg at 42nd. It is noted in a side bar to the tabulation that Cape Town had the highest number of
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