The success of the fight against crime should be rated on the number of cases solved and not merely on occurrence statistics, commentators say. Public Protector Thuli Madonsela recently called for the police to focus on the number of solved cases instead of using the national statistics on occurrences of crimes as their scorecard."When my team and I went to Singapore a few years ago we found that Singapore does not count the reduction in crime because that can be manipulated."If you say that in Claremont the number of rapes reported last year was 56 and the rapes reported this year is 36 it looks like there is progress."But we discovered, and I am talking from evidence, that some reported matters find their way out of the books."The Institute for Security Studies agreed that the national crime statistics, to be released tomorrow, should not be seen as a measure of police performance."The police should be measured on indicators under their control, such as detection rates (the proportion of crimes reported that are solved), levels of misconduct such as corruption, brutality and criminality committed by police officers, and community trust in the police," said ISS governance, crime and justice division head Gareth Newham.He said the police did release statistics on detection rates."These can be found in the SAPS annual reports for most of the key categories of crime. For example, the SAPS annual report for 2013-2014 shows that the police solved 29% of the murder cases they received."An SA report last year said there had been a 27.5% rise in the number of people arrested for serious crimes over the past decade. Almost 1.4million people were arrested in 2014 alone."But over the same period the number of convictions fell by 9.1%," Institute for Race Relations researcher Frans Cronje said."Convictions as a share of arrests fell from 30.4% to 21.7% even as one in every 350 people found themself in jail."If the police focused on dealing with priority crimes, such as robbery, clamped down on poor conduct by police officers and focused on improving the service's delivered to civilians, "then we will see substantial improvements in the crime rate and public perceptions of the police," Newham said."But that requires honest, highly experienced leadership, which is lacking at the moment as highlighted by the findings of the Marikana commission against the national commissioner of the police and some of her senior commanders."National commissioner Riah Phiyega has until today to explain to President Jacob Zuma why she should not be suspended pending the outcome of a board of inquiry into her fitness to hold office...