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The police have been scoring successes against robbers, people who use violence or the threat of violence to steal, although with 477 being convicted and jailed in the first five months of this year, few hear about all the successful arrests and prosecutions.
But just last week in Harare one gang was largely rounded up, with three arrested and the fourth now being hunted down, and a second gang was at least knocked out with one robber shot when attacking the police, although the other three did manage to escape, but without the car they used.
That second confrontation appears to have been fortuitous, a patrol bumping into a gang rather than an operation with the required back-up.
This sort of success helps. The main deterrent against any crime, and especially against planned crimes like robbery, is to show that you cannot get away with it and there is no gain except a long spell in prison. Robbers treat their criminal activities as a business, assembling a team and attacking a target.
So to beat them you have to show that there is no way of succeeding.
The most frightening part of robbery is the violence and the feeling of helplessness.
Guarding against “white collar” crime like fraud requires a degree of alertness, like wanting to see real title deeds before handing over wads of cash or feeding the bank account of a land baron, and most of us reckon we can cope with the non-violent thieves and pickpockets by taking modest precautions from keeping our doors locked to having our hands in our pockets.
But when five criminals confront you with a gun, or a set of machetes, or hit you on the head with a rock it is difficult to resist. And you not only see your possessions or money stolen, but you are often hurt and sometimes killed.
And we should be able to walk our streets, run our businesses or live in our homes without having to worry about violent crime.
The police continually give advice.
One of the almost constant refrains by police spokespeople when they give details of robbery is urging businesses and individuals not to keep large sums of cash.
The black market economy tends to encourage this, along with the desire by many who are quite honest to keep foreign currency in cash rather than a foreign currency bank account.
But no matter how secretive you are, if one person knows or suspects then the word can get around and those who are known to deal in cash transactions are especially targets. The advice not to have cash lying around is good, and anyone who keeps large sums is going to be a target.
The law for businesses, that they must bank their cash, not only helps the authorities track down tax evasion and the like, but it also removes the target.
Removing the target does help. Wallet thefts are now minimal, since no one wants to risk a jail sentence to grab bits of plastic; even the old days of forcing someone to put their card into an ATM does not work since ATMs rarely have cash and even when they do there is a queue.
Car theft was slashed to almost insignificant levels by that switch in procedures that requires a police check before a vehicle changes hands or can be taken out of the country, along with the modern locking systems that prevent hot wiring and require a complex key. Once again withdrawing the target worked rather well.
But besides the efforts to go after thieves and robbers, we need to make effort to dry up the market for stolen goods.
We read about robbers stealing mobile phones, and this is the most likely target of a pickpocket these days, and muggers go after phones. It is unlikely the thief wants a collection of phones and far more likely that they are selling them.
There is a legitimate market for second-hand phones. People buy a new one, and there are some who buy them fairly frequently, and sell the old one for what they can get long before it wears out or becomes useless. Sometimes they sell them to a friend or acquaintance or to a reputable dealer, even if it is a small business doing the dealing.
But there are far too many people willing to buy a phone from someone on the side of the road who has zero records of the phone, zero records of who they bought it from and in a fair number of cases is the actual thief. We all know, or suspect, when we might be buying stolen goods; for a start the price is just too much of a bargain.
And we are all aware where the dubious sales might be made, and the only reason we think of going there is to get a bargain.
It is the same when someone offers us a cheap television set or laptop, or when a dealer does not keep even the basic decent set of records of who sold the item. They might try to claim they are just slop, but some must realise they are fencing stolen goods.
A respectable second-hand dealer does keep accurate records and does try and assess the seller. But that is not everyone.
If there was no market for stolen goods, and no one kept piles of cash around, then a lot of crime would simply vanish. In many ways those of us who buy bargains from strangers, let alone from people we suspect might not be the most honest, are abetting crime.
When it comes to the worst sort of crime, the police are making strenuous efforts, although they could almost certainly not just be able to use more resources, but also more cooperation or information from the public.
And that cooperation means that people are less willing to buy dubious goods as well as passing on information that they police could find useful.
There has been criticism of the courts granting bail to robbery suspects. This is in the Constitution. But if we want to keep suspects on ice for a trial then we need to have that trial quickly, and that means the evidence has to be collected quickly and the prosecution ready to move forward fast.
Exceptionally high levels of suspicion are all very well when making an arrest, but the evidence has to be convincing for conviction. It is that detailed work that is sometimes taking forever.
Crime can be beaten back, but it requires everyone, police and public, to make the effort.
Online Reporter