Khayelitsha, a township of cape Town, South Africa, was established in 1985 during the apartheid era. It has experienced some of the highest crime rates in the Western cape. In 2003, the area reported 358 murders, 5888 sexual crimes and more than 3000 incidents of violent assault, according to the Crime Information Management Centre of the South African Police Sevices. At night, it was unsafe to return from work, and the township, which has few paved roads or formal structures, was difficult to patrol.

Recognizing that the many factors leading to the area’s high crime rate were often interlinked, the city of Cape Town, German Federal Ministry for Economic Develeopment, South African Treasury and Khayelitsha Development Forum called for the creation of a neighberhood- wide strategy. An initial baseline survey identified the top three crimes, which were murder, rape and robbery. However, rather than using a geographic information system (GIS)…