defenceWeb Written by ISSAfrica - 92 If police learn from their mistakes and implement those lessons, South Africa could become a safer place. South Africa’s recently released crime statistics reveal worrying increases in violent crime for the last quarter of 2020, including for murder, attempted murder, aggravated robbery and rape. They show that rising murder levels that started in 2012 are continuing and nothing done since then is working to reduce them. Has the South African Police Service (SAPS) failed? Of course it has. But so have all government departments, corporations and non-profit organisations, and not only in relation to crime. At some point, we all fail. Failure is inevitable, but learning from failure is not.