Six South African cities rank among the worst in the world for perceived crime. The problem is not that security companies fail to respond but rather how long it takes them to get to an incident or crime scene.
Now South African businesses are turning to automated emergency dispatch technology to minimise the response time to incidents.
Security callouts on an AI-driven security-tech platform called Aura rose 117% between 2024 and 2025, driven largely by reports of suspicious activity in cities with the highest crime perception levels.
The shift is visible in high-crime cities such as Pietermaritzburg, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Durban, Gqeberha and Cape Town, where companies are rethinking how incidents are routed to private security and medical responders as response delays raise costs.
Six South African cities now rank among the global top 20 for perceived crime, according to the latest Numbeo Crime Index.
Pietermaritzburg ranks first worldwide with a score of 82.8, followed by Pretoria in second place. Joburg, Durban, Gqeberha and Cape Town also appear high on the list. Although Numbeo measures perception rather than reported crime, businesses say fear of crime increasingly influences how they allocate security spend and manage daily operations.
Automated layer
The financial pressure is tangible:
- Companies add guards, shorten trading hours and reroute deliveries as security concerns rise;
- Retailers lose walk-in customers to online shopping. Infrastructure operators face service disruptions when criminal groups strip cellular towers and ATMs of batteries, diesel and generators; and
- Workers who rely on taxis and buses to commute arrive distracted, late or not at all because of crime fears.
Read: Sim crime goes industrial as fraudsters target South Africa’s digital economy
Private security resources are widespread across South Africa, but delays often occur between detection and arrival at an incident. Cameras, alarms and access control systems typically operate separately, leaving human coordination to bridge the gap. When an alert fires, a control room operator still has to identify the nearest available vehicle and make contact manually. That process adds time.
“That camera might be fantastic at picking up that someone is outside your premises,” Justin Suttner, Aura sub-Saharan GM, said in an interview with TechCentral. “But then there’s no one to respond.”
Aura sits above existing security infrastructure as an automated dispatch and routing layer. When an alert fires, an algorithm scans Aura’s network of vetted private security and medical providers, identifies the nearest available responder and routes them to the scene, removing the manual coordination step.
The company reports an average response time of under eight minutes. The platform also applies machine learning to incident data across its entire network to identify criminal patterns and reposition response vehicles before an alert is triggered, shifting the model from reactive response to predictive deployment.
“We consolidated all the private security and private medical providers onto one platform,” Suttner explained. “We built an algorithm that pairs the nearest responder.”
Aura’s data shows suspicious activity as its largest incident category. These alerts typically involve people loitering near premises. He said the volume of those reports indicates many incidents are being disrupted at the planning stage, before a crime takes place.
Aura is not the only platform targeting the coordination gap. Several companies are competing in the same space, using varying combinations of GPS-linked dispatch, machine-to-machine routing and control room escalation to connect businesses and individuals to armed response and emergency medical providers faster than traditional manual systems allow. The market is fragmented and growing. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
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