I am often asked why I write about crime so often.
The reason is I want to keep reminding us that it is not normal; and must never be seen as such.
Especially now that crime is seemingly becoming more and more brutal, I fear that we are becoming numb to it.
I need us to remain outraged when we hear about two women ambushed and shot inside their home.
Our jaws must continue to drop in disbelief at an 81-year-old woman being stabbed more than 60 times by four savages, including the very person tasked with caring for her.
It is very hard for me to call a fellow human being a savage, but I think it is completely justified.
I write about crime, because the barbarity that we are being exposed to is just not normal.
I’m always trying to understand crime and especially the cold-bloodedness with which people can act against each other.
I find it especially difficult to understand when it is perpetrated against society’s most vulnerable.
Last week I wrote about how the uneven distribution of wealth could be behind this increased aggression.
It is a thought that was sparked by something called the Gini Coefficient, which I would strongly suggest our leaders familiarise themselves with.
Simplified, it is an index that measures the distribution of wealth within a society and the effects it has.
It turns out that it can also be used to measure crime, and specifically the increase in brutality, as the wealth gap widens.
It is also something that has been thoroughly studied and tracked by social scientists, who note the lack of brutal crime in societies where wealth is relatively evenly distributed.
For example, in communities where everyone is equally poor, there’s very little brutal crime.
Just like in Scandinavian countries where all the citizens are equally wealthy, or have access to the same services.
In communities where there’s a big gap between rich and poor, there’s also a greater risk of dying a violent death at the hands over another person.
It’s the reason I suggested last week that we all learn to share, as a way of mitigating the increasing violence around us.
But while I wrote that suggestion, I also realised how unlikely that scenario is.
And I am borne out by a story I read in the week about a Joburg businessman who is making a killing (so to speak) armour plating cars for wealthy clients.
For more than a million rand at a time, he makes sure that a hijacker or thief’s bullet won’t be able to penetrate his client’s fancy car.
He has cleverly used the fear of brutality to make a good living for himself.
I just find it very interesting that we live in a society where we would rather spend our extra money on bulletproof cars, electric fences and armed response, than sharing it with our hopeless, starving fellow citizens.
After all, it’s them who continue to threaten our safety.