Violent crime figures reveal worsening trend for repeat victims

معنی واژه با لمس

1. 0:06Speaker 1: Kia ora, I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is The Front Page, a daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. Violent
2. 0:17Speaker 1: crime is on the rise again. New figures show the number of victims has climbed to around 148,000 a year,
3. 0:27Speaker 1: up 9,000 on the previous quarter. But dig into the numbers and the picture gets a little bit more complicated.
4. 0:34Speaker 1: So what is really happening with violent crime in New Zealand and how much can we actually say about the government's record? Today on the front page, NZ Herald senior
5. 0:45Speaker 1: journalist Derek Chang is with us to crunch the numbers.
6. 0:51Speaker 1: So Derek, what is actually happening with violent crime in New Zealand and how much can we actually say that the government has done anything about it?
7. 0:59Speaker 2: There are a number of different measures of violent crime, so it's a little complicated, but in essence the government has a public service target to reduce the number of
8. 1:10Speaker 2: violent crime victims over a year, the annual number of victims, that is, and that's according to a particular data set, and that is the New Zealand Crime and Victims Survey,
9. 1:20Speaker 2: which is considered a more robust set. It's based on thousands of interviews over a year. It includes unreported crime, which a lot of the other data sets don't include.
10. 1:31Speaker 2: About three-quarters of all crime is never reported to police, so the vast majority. And the trends since this government
11. 1:40Speaker 2: came in, the annual number of violent crime victims was going up. And then sort of mid 2024, it peaked
12. 1:48Speaker 2: and it has started to drop. But interestingly, since October last year, we've now had consecutive quarterly data that show
13. 1:57Speaker 2: it rising again. So that's the general trend. The greater question around what it has to do with the government is,
14. 2:06Speaker 2: is a very kind of complicated picture. And obviously, when these numbers are going down, the government loves to say, look at what we're doing, aren't we fabulous? And when they go up, they like to say, it's got nothing
15. 2:18Speaker 2: to do with us. There's lots of, you know, violent crime is a multifactorial thing. Lots of issues intersect. So, I mean, it's very hard to say what anything, you know,
16. 2:29Speaker 2: the impact of government policy has. But in general, it's the targets was to have 20,000 fewer annual violent crime
17. 2:38Speaker 2: victims by 2029. And even though the trend is going up since October, the government is still well ahead of
18. 2:47Speaker 2: its target. So the latest numbers are from the year to May. There's an estimated 148,000 annual victims of violent crime,
19. 2:57Speaker 2: which is defined as sexual assault, non-sexual assault and robbery.
20. 3:01Speaker 2: And the 2029 target is 165,000. So that's still 17,000 victims fewer than what the goal is.
21. 3:13Speaker 1: What else did the numbers tell us about the types of violent crime that we're seeing?
22. 3:18Speaker 2: Well, it's kind of interesting because there's a lot of data that you can kind of dive into really deeply if you're into that sort of thing. And it broke
23. 3:30Speaker 2: it down regionally. So... violent crime victims, the number has
24. 3:37Speaker 2: been dropping basically in Auckland consistently since mid-2024. But since October last year, it's been going up in basically every
25. 3:49Speaker 2: other part of the country. And another interesting breakdown of the data is that most of the increase, or in
26. 3:59Speaker 2: fact all of the increase, has come from non-sexual assault victims.
27. 4:04Speaker 2: So there were 12,000 more such victims compared to October.
28. 4:11Speaker 2: And that's just basically broken down between family violence and non-family violence. And then another interesting part of the data
29. 4:21Speaker 2: is victimizations and the highly victimized. So there's been a huge decrease in one-off victims and there's been a huge decrease in people who've experienced two or three violent crime
30. 4:32Speaker 2: incidents in the past year, but there's been a massive increase in the highly victimized. That's something that's come through in other data recently, but this has really articulated it
31. 4:43Speaker 2: a lot more. So these are the people who experience four or more violent crime incidents in a year. And
32. 4:51Speaker 2: I was speaking with the chief victim's advisor, Ruth Money, about this. These people tend to be Victims of family violence, you know, because they actually live in a place where
33. 5:02Speaker 2: they can't get away from the problem. So the highly victimized is what they're called. This number grew 40% compared
34. 5:12Speaker 2: to the last quarter, and it's more than doubled in the year to May compared to the previous year. And the baseline number, so the report about all this compares
35. 5:22Speaker 2: everything to the baseline number, which is October 2023. This is one of the few numbers where the current number is higher than the baseline number. So, you know, family
36. 5:33Speaker 2: violence has obviously been a big issue in New Zealand, something that we've, you know, been trying to fight. This kind of suggests that we're not doing very well there.
37. 5:45Speaker 1: Yeah, it's funny. I mean, with these numbers and with this data, I know that the first thing that someone's going to be like as well, is it because more people are reporting such crime?
38. 5:55Speaker 2: Well, that's kind of interesting because this data set includes unreported crime. And obviously, no data set is definitive, but the strength of this data set is that it does
39. 6:06Speaker 2: include unreported crime. We can look at other data sets that only look at reported crime, and they tend to show the number's not really decreasing. So Christopher Luxon, for example,
40. 6:18Speaker 2: he loves to say that violent crime went up 33% under Labour. And it more or less did, but not regarding this data set. It's a completely different data set.
41. 6:27Speaker 2: It's a police data set. And if you look at that data set under this government, that's actually gone up as well under his watch. Not as steeply as under the previous government, but it's still gone up. So it's
42. 6:37Speaker 2: a politician's thing. They don't really like comparing apples to apples when it's not very politically convenient. But it's interesting, too,
43. 6:44Speaker 2: because one of the suggested trends in the data is that there's been a decrease, and that has been in
44. 6:54Speaker 2: low-level violence or low-level violent crime. And that's coming through in this survey data because the police data, you know, if something happens and people feel like it's serious enough
45. 7:06Speaker 2: to report it to police, then generally it comes at the more serious end of the spectrum. So then if that police data hasn't really dropped and is ticking up,
46. 7:15Speaker 2: it kind of suggests that there's been an uneven decrease in violent crime and it's been more happening at the low-level end.
47. 7:24Speaker 1: So just to be clear, when we talk about unreported, that means that it's unreported to police?
48. 7:31Speaker 2: Essentially, yeah. And there's a number of reasons for that,
49. 7:36Speaker 2: you know, Victims of sexual assault are often really traumatized.
50. 7:43Speaker 2: They're distrustful of the system. They might think that nothing will happen. A family violence victim might not want to
51. 7:53Speaker 2: report something about someone they love or someone they're married to.
52. 7:59Speaker 2: And there's a threshold where an offense becomes a crime or if it doesn't meet that threshold. And that's all
53. 8:09Speaker 2: kind of like in the methodology in the New Zealand
54. 8:12Speaker 2: Crime and Victims Survey. So, you know, it's been around
55. 8:22Speaker 2: since 2018. And, you know, before that, we didn't really have any kind of perspective or look into unreported crime.
56. 8:32Speaker 2: So that's basically the strength of that data.
57. 8:41Speaker 3: And the previous government's answer was quite simple. Fewer people in prison, fewer consequences for crime, and more excuses for offenders.
58. 8:50Speaker 2: And the result was really predictable.
59. 8:51Speaker 3: Violent crime surged, retail crime exploded, and ordinary Kiwis paid the price. And that era is ending because Paul Goldsmith and Mark Mitchell are restoring law and order by doing
60. 9:03Speaker 3: what should always have been done. Backing our police, standing up for victims, not offenders, and making it clear that crime has real consequences.
61. 9:14Speaker 1: What do the numbers tell us about what's happening in the regions?
62. 9:18Speaker 2: Well, I touched on this before really, um, the, the, the increase in the annual number of violent crime victims, um,
63. 9:28Speaker 2: is happening all over the country, except in Auckland. It would be interesting to kind of extrapolate, um, some of
64. 9:34Speaker 2: the police community patrols, for example, um, Because that has been something that Police Minister Mark Mitchell has been really
65. 9:44Speaker 2: big on, especially in Auckland, and whether that has had more of an impact in Auckland than in other parts of the country. There's another interesting part of the data, too,
66. 9:55Speaker 2: because the data also, in the survey data, I mean, it breaks down crime where alcohol is involved and where no alcohol is involved. And we've never really had a view.
67. 10:06Speaker 2: You know, we've never really had any insight into that before.
68. 10:09Speaker 2: And that's a really it's kind of contradictory because the
69. 10:17Speaker 2: massive drop in the number of annual violent crime victims correlates really strongly with the drop in the number of
70. 10:26Speaker 2: violent crimes where alcohol was involved. And that's from the period of mid 2024 to October last year. But very curiously and kind of weirdly, as that trend has gone
71. 10:37Speaker 2: up again, it's correlated very strongly with crimes where no alcohol was involved. So it doesn't really make any sense.
72. 10:47Speaker 2: And the data doesn't tell us why that's happening. nor is a causation. But there are a number of studies, obviously,
73. 10:55Speaker 2: about the impact of alcohol and how often crime is related to the consumption of alcohol, particularly under people who
74. 11:04Speaker 2: struggle with things like emotional regulation.
75. 11:08Speaker 1: You mentioned that you've spoken to Ruth Money. She's the chief victim's advisor. What else did she have to say?
76. 11:16Speaker 2: Well, I tried to get her to give us an insight into the highly victimized because that isn't really extrapolated
77. 11:28Speaker 2: in the survey data. So, you know, I asked her, who are the highly victimized typically? And she said, these
78. 11:38Speaker 2: are usually the same communities. She said Maori, disability, and rainbow communities. And these are the communities who in studies
79. 11:49Speaker 2: and surveys over many years are disproportionately affected by crime
80. 11:56Speaker 2: and social disadvantage. And she also said that family violence is often a space where there's a large number of highly victimized survivors. You know, for the reasons that I
81. 12:08Speaker 2: mentioned before, you know, it's much harder for them to get away from the place where that tends to happen.
82. 12:14Speaker 1: Crime isn't as much of a hot button issue as it has been in elections past, I suppose. I'm kind of thinking back to 2023 and the whole ram raiding
83. 12:26Speaker 1: situation that was major top of voters' minds. But crime consistently is kind of when voters are asked about what
84. 12:36Speaker 1: they care about most, it's consistently in the top five.
85. 12:40Speaker 1: How do you think these kind of numbers play out in terms of what voters will be looking at this election season?
86. 12:49Speaker 2: Well, I think last election it was consistently number two or three behind the cost of living. That in part
87. 12:57Speaker 2: was due to extensive media coverage of ram raiding, for example,
88. 13:04Speaker 2: which actually started dropping well before the election. And I think this year in the various Ipsos surveys, uh, law
89. 13:15Speaker 2: and order has fallen quite a lot, but there has been, um, some polling done where if it's framed around, we don't want to go back to three years ago. Um, then
90. 13:26Speaker 2: it can be very appealing to some voters, you know? Um, so yeah, I think overall law and order is a,
91. 13:35Speaker 2: is a success story for this government. Um, Like I said before, how much you can actually attribute it to government policy is an open question. And one of the
92. 13:45Speaker 2: major contributing factors to the increase in crime, this is between sort of 2022 and 2024. This is violent crime
93. 13:54Speaker 2: and youth crime. It was really a post-COVID movement, which was mirrored all around the world. And when youth crime in particular started dropping, this was in just over two
94. 14:05Speaker 2: years ago. So it was well before COVID. any of the key government policies involving Oranga Tamariki and bootcamps, et cetera, were put in. When it started dropping, I talked to
95. 14:17Speaker 2: a few experts, such as the Children's Commissioner at the time, who were basically like, we don't really know why this is happening. And it's probably a return to the pre-COVID
96. 14:26Speaker 2: norms or the pre-COVID trend. So politicians love simple messages like,
97. 14:36Speaker 2: crimes going down compared to three years ago, success story.
98. 14:40Speaker 2: The reality is it's a very complex picture. Of course, government policy plays a role, but so does a myriad of other factors.
99. 14:51Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us, Derek.
100. 14:52Speaker 2: Thanks, Chelsea.
101. 14:56Speaker 1: That's it for this episode of The Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage
102. 15:03Speaker 1: at nzherald.co.nz. The Front Page is hosted and produced by me, Chelsea Daniels. Kane Dickey is our studio operator, Richard Martin,
103. 15:13Speaker 1: our producer and editor, and our executive producer is Jane Yee.
104. 15:18Speaker 1: Follow The Front Page on the iHeart app or wherever you get your podcasts and join us next time for another look beyond the headlines.
105. 15:26Speaker 2: MUSIC