Crime drops to record low

The Herald reports:

New Zealand’s crime rate has dropped to an all-time low, latest figures reveal.

The annual crime statistics released by the police today showed recorded crime dropped 5.2 per cent on the previous year.

There were 394,522 recorded offences in the 2011-2012 fiscal year, compared with 416,324 the previous year – a decrease of 21,802 offences.

New Zealand’s population increased by 0.7 per cent during the period, resulting in a 5.9 per cent decrease in the number of offences recorded per 10,000 of population.

This was the lowest number of offences in any fiscal year since 1988-1989, and the lowest crime rate per head of population since before electronic records were maintained, police said.

This is obviously a good thing, and is to be welcomed. Kudos to the Police for the generally outstanding and tough work they do. Also kudos to the respective Ministers who have delivered extra resources to the Police, and law changes to make NZ safer.

As I’ve said many times before though, the overall crime rate is not a particularly useful figure. That is because it treats all crimes as equal (a homicide and a cannabis possession charge both count as one crime) and also because some types of crimes may go up or down depending on how much emphasis is placed on enforcing them.

So while it is a good figure, I like to look at the details by category, and place most emphasis on violent crime rates as they are the most likely to be reported, and tend to be those that cause the most trauma, along with sexual assaults.

So the category changes are:

• Homicides – 22%
• Assaults – 7.4%
• Sexual Assaults +2.9%
• Robbery & Extortion – 8.6%
• Burglaries – 4.0%

That’s a very impressive drop off in terms of the two main violent crime categories. Sexual Assaults have not shown the same drop off (mind you reporting varies much more with them), so is an obvious area to focus on.