Mfuleni records 73 murders in three months, the highest of any station in South Africa

Seventy three people were murdered in Mfuleni between April and June 2026, the highest count recorded at any police station in the country for the quarter.

Nyanga recorded 56 murders over the same three months, the third highest nationally, and Philippi East and Delft followed with 53 each, ranked fourth and fifth. Harare was sixth with 49, Khayelitsha tenth with 44, Kraaifontein eleventh with 43, Gugulethu sixteenth with 37 and Mitchell’s Plain twenty seventh with 30. As IOL reported on 16 September, those rankings come from the Western Cape’s first-quarter crime statistics for the 2026/2027 financial year.

Across the province, 1 071 people were murdered in the three months, and 869 of those killings were recorded in the City of Cape Town district.

What the numbers cover

The murder figures count cases opened at a station. The separate ranking for community-reported serious crime counts something different: 17 categories of offence that residents lay with the police themselves, from assault to burglary to robbery.

Cape Town Central sits first in the country on that measure with 2 559 cases. Mitchell’s Plain is sixth with 1 619, Mfuleni ninth with 1 584, Delft tenth with 1 541, Kraaifontein thirteenth with 1 491 and Worcester twenty ninth with 1 228. A station high on this list is busy, and a busy central station is not the same thing as a violent one. Both numbers matter and they answer different questions.

The police’s own account of what drives the killings

The province’s top officer, Lieutenant-General Sizakhele Dyantyi, said firearms remain the weapon of choice in violent crime in the Western Cape.

“Our job is to rid communities of illegal firearms and ammunition through targeted operations,” he said.

That work produced 610 firearms confiscated in the province between April and June. Separately, 792 cases of illegal possession of firearms and ammunition were recorded in the quarter, down from 821 in the same period last year. The police note that this is a count of offences, not of individual weapons taken off the street.

SAPS analysis attributes 217 of the quarter’s murders to gang violence or gang initiation, 210 to arguments, misunderstandings and fights, and 139 to retaliation, revenge or punishment. Dyantyi listed gang violence, taxi-related conflict, extortion, targeted killings, hijackings and arguments as the causes behind murder, attempted murder and assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.

“Mfuleni, Delft, Mitchell’s Plain, Gugulethu, Nyanga, Kraaifontein, Philippi East, among others, remain top stations for murders and attempted murders,” he said. “Every endeavour is made to ensure these communities are made safer for all.”

Rape cases rose, and the reporting is concentrated

Rape cases in the province rose 3,8% in the quarter, from 1 066 to 1 106. The City of Cape Town accounted for 703 of them.

“The scourge of crime against women and children continues to afflict the communities we serve,” Dyantyi said. “During the period under review, rape shows an increase prompting continuous interventions to curb the crime.”

What changes for people living here

A murder ranking is a record of where people died, and it lands on the same streets where residents already organise their days around risk: which route home after a late shift, whether a child walks to school, whether a shop stays open past dark. The stations named above are the ones whose detectives carry the heaviest caseloads in the province, and the ones where a family reporting a killing waits longest for an answer.

The firearm figures are the part of the picture the police can act on directly. A weapon recovered in Delft or Nyanga is a weapon that cannot be used in Gugulethu next month, which is why the province’s stated priority is illegal firearms and ammunition rather than the murder count itself.

Dyantyi said covert and overt intelligence-led operations targeting illegal firearms and ammunition linked to murders, attempted murders and aggravated robberies would continue.

“With renewed vigour we undertake to do even more to ensure Western Cape communities are and feel safe,” he said.

The next set of Western Cape figures, covering July to September 2026, is due with the national quarterly release later this year, and will show whether the firearm operations moved the murder count in the stations named above.

Source: IOL, Western Cape stations rank among South Africa’s top murder and serious-crime hotspots