THE violent death of Alistair Hector raised only the barest of blips on the crime monitors of the South African police service and attracted scant attention from the South African media.

Under the old apartheid regime, the murder of a white man would have merited at least a few paragraphs, because white lives were deemed to be more precious than those of blacks.

In today's post-apartheid South Africa, the murder of white men and women is no longer an unusual or newsworthy event, unless they are rich notables or political celebrities.

Like the hapless black victims of violent crime under the old regime, white murder victims disappear anonymously into the seemingly endless list of statistics compiled by sociologists.

While the advent of democracy and the emergence of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress as the new governing party has seen a marked decrease in politically-motivated violence, the same cannot be said of criminal violence. On the contrary, the installation of the ANC government in 1994 coincided with a sharp rise in crime.

Figures from police reports and published in the Institute of Race Relations survey for 1997-98 show the annual murder rate rose from around 19,600 in the last year of National Party rule in 1993 to 24,600 in the fourth year of the ANC rule in 1997. Rapes rose from 27,000 to 52,150, while assaults jumped from 144,500 to 234,550. In fairness to the ANC, two points should be made.

The increase in crime reaches back to the 1970s, indicating that it may be a long-term phenomenon, though the rate of increase appears to have gone up sharply immediately after the ANC won the watershed general election.

Since 1994, the rate for some crimes - including murder - has stabilised, to use police terminology, although as Ms Antoinette Louw, of the Institute for Security Studies points out, it has stabilised at a high level.

Optimism generated by the ''stabilisation'' of crime levels needs to be tempered. For some crimes - including rape - the graph is still rising, dramatically so.

Many South Africans are deeply sceptical of police statisticians. They suspect them of putting a gloss on the crime situation to please their political masters.

The feelings of a majority of South Africans, black and white, is summed up in their repeated calls for the restoration of the death penalty which, after being effectively suspended in the late 1980s, was declared a contravention of the constitution by the constitutional court in 1995.

It reflects their refusal to accept assurances by the government that it is bringing crime under control, slowly but surely. Rightly or wrongly, they see the rise in crime as a direct response of the abolition of the capital punishment.

Mr Mandela has shown increasing irritation, accusing opposition forces of mounting ''a massive propaganda campaign . . . without any regard for the truth'' and charging those who have campaigned for the reintroduction of the death penalty of wanting to ''hang those who are black and poor''.

He has poured scorn on the mainly white South Africans who have emigrated rather than live in a crime-ridden society. He accuses them of lacking patriotism, stating the murder rate in wealthy white areas is one-tenth of that in poorer black areas.

''Good riddance,'' he says but, ironically, they are often people with the education and skills needed to help South Africa's economy grow and thus reduce unemployment, a major cause of crime.

In their book, The South African Dream, John Hunt and Reg Lascaris identify crime as one of the most significant impediments to realising the goal of uniting South Africans of all colours into a prosperous and happy nation. Of police figures about a decline in the murder rate, they state: ''Try telling a widow grieving for a murdered husband about improving percentages and you risk a place in the next set of crime statistics.''