Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. We're the programme that

explores the numbers all around us in the news and in life and I'm Tim Halford.

This week we take a look at an alarming statistic from South Africa.

Cape Town tourist hotspot where eight people murdered a day.

A boring murder rate drives Cape Town up list of deadliest cities.

Cape Fear. Love Island bosses warn not to film in murder capital Cape Town as it's too dangerous.

Those were reports from the BBC and two British newspapers, The Times and the Sun,

offering us the ultimate in parochial news. Far away city too dangerous to film reality TV show.

But is Cape Town really quite such a deadly place? And if so, why? And does that mean tourists

should stay away? Anine Kriegler is a researcher at the centre of criminology at the University of

Cape Town. She's been looking at data from the South African police for the year 2017 to 2018.

We do see that the city of Cape Town had 2892 murders in the last year and that is 7.9 or

8 murders a day. So the BBC headline was correct but to understand what it means, we need some

context. Is that an unusually high number of murders given the population of Cape Town?

Anine had to do a lot of work with the data because South Africa's police don't collect it on a

city by city basis. But in the end she found Cape Town's murder rate in the last year on the police

record is 69 per 100,000 per annum. That is the highest of any of the major cities in the country.

So that's dangerous even by South African standards. It double the national rate of around 35

murders per 100,000. And it's vastly higher than the homicide rate in London, 1.3 per 100,000.

New York is a little more dangerous but still closer to London than to Cape Town.

There are places in the US that compare St Louis with one of the highest homicide rates in the US

suffers 66 murders per 100,000 residents. So the basic numbers are correct but whether the

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