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The rise in crime and especially the 11 percent surge in robberies in the first eight months of this year and the six percent rise in road traffic accidents with 1 352 fatalities, are worrying, but to be sharply reduced need backing from people as well as police.
In one sense robbery and traffic accidents are crimes of growing prosperity. It is not much use robbing those with very little and when there are not many vehicles on the road drivers can drive badly and still not kill anyone.
A sift through the robbery reports we publish finds that a lot are armed thefts of money from those who insist on stashing US dollar banknotes in safes, in hiding places or carrying them around in cars.
There is a very safe alternative, the banks, who are these days all sound and can store money in electronic form.
If your money, or almost all your money, is in a bank account of some sort you can access it easily, even at 2am on a laptop or phone connected to a wireless line or wi-fi, and move money around or make payments for large items.
If you need small sums to buy goods in a tuckshop or even from the pavement, banks have ATMs loaded with US dollar banknotes. No one is going to risk 10 years in jail to rob anyone of a couple of hundred dollars, and no one can rob you when you use a swipe card or online money transfer.
Admittedly some people want vast piles of cash stashed under their mattress or in their wardrobe because they are cheating on taxes, are trying to launder money, are speculating in the black market or are just generally up to little good.
That squealing when the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe slashed the amount people can carry out of the country in cash shows the sort of the problem.
People can still carry far more out of the country in an internationally recognised brand of debit card without any bother and can use that pre-loaded card almost anywhere in the world, at least if they are buying legal goods from someone with a bank account.
So it is difficult to understand why some people want to make themselves a target for armed robbers by keeping large sums in a safe at work or home, or even piles of cash, when they can use a bank.
We even saw this at the beginning of this school term when robbers hit a school, and got almost nothing as the school authorities had rushed everything to a bank.
It is difficult to keep large sums totally hidden. Domestic workers, and even your best friends, can inadvertently spill the beans, or even be bribed to talk, and the robbers will then call.
That huge robbery of cash in transit recently in Bulawayo is in a sense a direct result of this cash worship in Zimbabwe. The bank was obviously moving the cash to branches where customers wanted it. But if the customers were using cards and other electronic storage then they would not need cash, and the bank would not be moving it.
The police, of course, have to protect people regardless or whether they are sensible or not, and while they continually plead for people to use banks to store money they do have to take on the extra burden of trying to prevent robbery and then tracking down the robbers.
One problem of our dual currency system is that people can grab the US dollar cash and spend it over a border.
The police have had a fairly good run of catching robbers and on the detection side have been building up successes, which is important. If people have a high risk of a long jail term when they rob this discourages them.
But we agree with Minister of Home Affairs and Cultural Heritage Kazembe Kazembe that police officers need to be continually working out better ways to deter crime and catch criminals. We just note we can help them help us by being sensible.
We have brought up the problem of rising traffic accidents before. It is a direct result of more vehicles on better roads, but unfortunately without drivers becoming better and more law abiding. Efforts to persuade drivers to obey the law and rules of the road and read and follow the Highway Code have limited effect.
Many reckon they can get away with it.
We think that it is possible to equip the police with the basic equipment they need, and for the two most important contributions to accidents, high speed and drinking alcohol, there are simple tools these days, the radar speed traps and the breathalysers.
The initial capital costs would soon be recovered from the flood of fines before drivers realised that the old days are gone, that Zimbabwe was imposing rational standards and then start behaving, and then the systems could just be retained so everyone knew they were being watched and stopped playing the fool.
Traffic fines should not be a revenue source, since the object is to have good drivers who never have to pay fines, but when there is money it can be spent equipment.
The rise in these two crimes are both centred on a more prosperous country, more people with money and without sense who can be robbed, and more people with money and a car who do not care.
A lot of the police effort is to persuade people to be sensible and to care.
Online Reporter