African Arguments

Top Menu

  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

Main Menu

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Climate
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • Think African [Podcast]
    • #EndSARS
    • Into Africa [Podcast]
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Africa Science Focus [Podcast]
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Debating Ideas
  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

logo

African Arguments

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Climate
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • Think African [Podcast]
    • #EndSARS
    • Into Africa [Podcast]
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Africa Science Focus [Podcast]
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Debating Ideas
MalawiSociety
Home›African Arguments›Country›Southern›Malawi›No one knows if crime in Malawi is rising or falling, not even the police

No one knows if crime in Malawi is rising or falling, not even the police

By Tyler Holmes
May 3, 2022
837
0
UN Women's Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka greeting officers of the Malawi Police at in Lilongwe, Malawi. Credit: Maria Thundu

Because the police either don’t collect or release reliable crime statistics, citizens are in the dark.

UN Women's Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka greeting officers of the Malawi Police at in Lilongwe, Malawi. Credit: Maria Thundu

UN Women’s Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka greeting officers of the Malawi Police at in Lilongwe, Malawi. Credit: Maria Thundu

In 2020, Malawi was featured in the New York Times series, “The World Through a Lens”, which features photos from “some of our planet’s most beautiful and intriguing places”. Then a resident of the country, I was happy to see Malawi highlighted in such a way. The piece was generally innocuous; several friends shared the accompanying photos on social media. I was surprised at one line, however, especially from a writer who claimed to be “wary of clichés and generalizations” – namely that since the author’s first visit 14 years earlier, “crime has risen dramatically”.

As a lawyer seconded to the Malawi Police Service, I spent over three years listening to police officers, visiting police cells, and reading research and local journalism about crime. There is no reliable evidence that crime has increased between 2006 and 2020. In fact, there is little evidence either way. The Malawi Police Service does not collect reliable crime statistics or make such information public, or some combination of the two.

What we know

We do know some things. In 2006, Malawi’s homicide rate per 100,000 people was 6.3. In 2012, the last year for which the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has data, the rate was 1.8, a more than 70% drop. We also know that at Lilongwe Model Police Station, the number of arrests decreased every year from 2017 to 2020. This trend didn’t last into 2021, largely thanks to arrests driven by Covid-19 regulation violations and “sweeping” exercises. Finally, we can see from data collected by the World Prison Brief that the number of prisoners as a proportion of Malawi’s population peaked in 2006.

More circumstantial evidence comes from Malawian responses to Afrobarometer surveys, some of which seems to point in opposite directions. On the one hand, the proportion of Malawian respondents who rank crime and security as a top three priority for the country has fallen slightly from 7% in 2005 to 6.3% in 2019.

On the other, there was a nine-point increase between 2005 and 2014 of both people saying something had been stolen from their house in the past year and respondents reporting that someone in their family had been physically attacked in the previous 12 months. Additionally, the proportion of Malawians who said the government was doing fairly or very badly at reducing crime increased from 46% in 2005 to 63.3% in 2019.

The police itself reveals crime figures when it serves their institutional interests. They share quarterly figures of year over year crime when it suits them. This kind of data is inadequate at best at identifying trends, and the Malawian police rarely consider the possible reasons for changes such as population growth, the political environment, or the underreporting of crime. According to the 2004-2005 census, the reporting rate for assault was just 17%; Afrobarometer’s 2012 survey found a reporting rate of all crime of 36%. And year-over-year or quarter-over-quarter figures are inadequate, at best.

The importance of being transparent

As noted in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage, “evidence points to a link between transparency and citizens’ perceptions of government corruption”. The latter is high in Malawi. President Lazarus Chakwera has vowed to change this and “end the era of government secrecy and usher in the dawn of government accountability”, in part by bringing the Access to Information Act, 2017 into force. But the Malawi Police Service has a role to play too.

In the spirit of transparency and to ensure accountability, the police should regularly share and publish information about: 1) the demographics and size of the police service, including the number of officers who leave the police each year and the various reasons why; 2) the number and type of complaints received against officers and the disposal of those complaints; 3) information around police uses of force, at minimum whenever bullets or tear gas are discharged; 4) comprehensive statistics about reports made to the police, arrests made, cases prosecuted, bailed and diverted, and the number of individuals sentenced; and 5) the number of traffic stops made, tickets issued, and monies collected.

To ensure accurate reporting and hold government and civil servants responsible, the Malawian Constitution and the Access to Information Act explain that governments and institutions must be transparent. Malawians deserve more than patchy data and circumstantial evidence. They deserve to know how much crime is present in the country as well as what and how their police are acting to address public safety. They deserve to know, amongst other things, if crime is indeed rising or falling.


 

Previous Article

Nigeria’s official language is English. Why do ...

Next Article

We cannot keep leaving women with disabilities ...

Tyler Holmes

Tyler Holmes spent over three years as a programme lawyer seconded to the Malawi Police Service, working to collect information about pretrial detention and advocating for the diversion of children in conflict with the law.

Leave a reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  • Politics

    In Memoriam: Prof. Abdel Rahman Musa Abakar

  • COVID-19Debating IdeasSouth Africa

    Experiencing Covid-19 after Apartheid

  • Politics

    A year after Westgate: what has Kenya learned? – By Jeremy Lind and Patrick Mutahi

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter


  • 81.7K+
    Followers

Find us on Facebook

Interactive Elections Map

Keep up to date with all the African elections.

Recent Posts

  • Senegal’s angry protesters are proud defenders of their democracy
  • We analysed climate research on Africa. Here’s what we found
  • Could the jihadis dismantle the Sahelian state?
  • Nigeria’s Happy City is on the brink of being swallowed by the sea
  • Cameroon: The keyboard warlords of the breakaway republic

Editor’s Picks

Editor's PicksSocietySudan

Charlie Chaplin and the reclaiming of Sudan

Khartoum’s locally-organised open air film screenings epitomise much about Sudan’s ongoing revolution. This article was made possible by the generous “supporter” subscribers of the Africa Insiders Newsletter. The little bit ...
  • President Emmanuel Macron of France during his three-country tour in Africa. Credit: Présidence de la République du Bénin.

    Liberté, Egalité, Impunité

    By Billy Burton
    August 16, 2022
  • Girls in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, which has been at war since November 2020. Credit: Rod Waddington.

    Tigray: Our suffering may not be convenient, but it is real

    By Temesgen Kahsay
    August 3, 2021
  • uganda 2021

    How Museveni mastered violence to win elections in Uganda

    By Kristof Titeca & Anna Reuss
    November 19, 2020
  • Poster of the legendary Thomas Mapfumo/Oliver Mtukudzi concerts in 2013. Image courtesy: Diana Jeater.

    Why ZANU-PF still can’t dance to chimurenga music

    By Mwai Daka
    April 19, 2023

Brought to you by


Creative Commons

Creative Commons Licence
Articles on African Arguments are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
  • Cookies
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
© Copyright African Arguments 2020
By continuing to browse this site, you agree to our use of cookies.