: In South Africa, the interlacing socio-economic challenges of crime and high unemployment have long been a cause for concern. These challenges have also prompted extensive attention from scholars. Thus, the relationship between crime and unemployment emerges as one of the important niche areas of inquiry. The study used time series data from 1995 to 2020 to address this nexus. An Autoregressive Distributive Lag was deemed fit for this study as the data properties point to its use.