The group says that the application has been built over several months and involved the processing of hundreds of thousands of official crime statistic records from 1 158 policing precincts from 2017 to 2022.

The statistics will continue to be updated when crime data is released each quarter, adds News24.

"This is a unique data journalism tool that we have developed for News24's readers to be informed about crime in their neighbourhoods, or when they plan to relocate," says Adriaan Basson, News24's editor-in-chief.

CrimeCheck aims to provide a gauge of risk on a series of crime indices, as well as on several individual crimes like murder and burglary. It also provides detail of each of the more than 50 crime types in every precinct, which are reflected in the South African Police Service's data.

The engine of the CrimeCheck risk gauge is the rate of crime per 1 000 people in a police precinct or the rate of crime per 1 000 households in a precinct, according to News24.

The group adds that the challenge is that South Africa's police precinct boundaries do not match any other geographic boundaries like suburbs, wards or towns, so there are no readily available population numbers for precincts.

News24 worked with a Geographic Information Systems mapping expert and started with the last available census in 2011. News24 has been able to calculate populations and household estimates for every precinct for each year in its dataset by also drawing on annual district-level population estimates provided by Statistics South Africa.

News24 adds that these figures are then used to calculate the crime rate for various categories of crime types in each precinct. From these rates, it then used a statistical normalisation technique to derive a value between zero and one for each category and precinct, which allows the precincts to be compared to each other and compared from year to year. This is the value, which powers the risk gauge for each precinct says News24.

CrimeCheck also includes a page where it has calculated the daily average of each crime type for every year and for the currently available year. The group says that this is useful because it can be difficult to understand if the year is worse or better than previous years. The daily average provides that insight.

Finally, the user is also able to compare up to three precincts side by side. This could be useful if you are researching neighbourhoods if you are planning to move or buy a property or if you are simply curious about the risk where friends and family live.

Individuals can assess the risk in their neighbourhood here. 

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