DA urges Cachalia to fix flawed GBVF statistics before next crime release

The Democratic Alliance has demanded that Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia ensure the South African Police Service releases accurate, disaggregated crime statistics on offences affecting women and children, warning that flawed data could undermine the government’s response to gender-based violence and femicide.

DA seeks corrected figures and a firm deadline

The DA’s spokesperson on police, Lisa Schickerling, wrote to Cachalia asking that SAPS correct the problems affecting its data and commit to a firm date for publishing corrected figures if it cannot meet the November release deadline. The party wants subsequent crime-statistics releases prepared using accurate, disaggregated data so the country can properly understand the scale of GBVF and measure progress.

What the DA says is wrong with the data

According to the DA, SAPS has admitted to Parliament that its statistics on crimes against women and children are “inherently inaccurate”, with data described as fundamentally flawed and unusable. The reported problems include:

• offences being counted more than once, producing cases where the number of women and children victims exceeds the total number of victims recorded for certain crimes, including rape;
• inconsistencies in recording victims’ ages and sexes; and
• failures to correctly link victims to the appropriate charges.

Concerns about resource allocation and accountability

Schickerling warned that inaccurate statistics raise questions about how government can allocate resources to fight GBVF effectively.

“How can government properly allocate resources to fight GBVF when the very crime statistics on which any strategy must be based are inherently wrong?”

The DA said the failure to accurately record data obscured the scale of the crisis, made it difficult to measure progress, allocate resources effectively and hold SAPS accountable. GBVF was declared a national crisis in November 2025.

Context: recent government GBVF measures

The DA’s demand comes as government moves to implement President Cyril Ramaphosa’s latest GBVF interventions, which include a 60-day audit of unresolved murders, attempted murders, rapes and serious sexual offences involving women and children, and a funded plan to address forensic backlogs.

Previous acknowledgements of data issues

According to IOL, IOL reported in March that Cachalia said SAPS were reviewing crime data systems to prevent errors when cases involving women and children are recorded at police station level. Cachalia had acknowledged that the data was not always properly captured and warned that publishing it in its existing form could mislead the public and policymakers. At that time he said SAPS was developing a system enhancement but there was no definite date for when improved statistics would be available.