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Crime is set to be a big election year issue, with polls showing the public feels unsafe and the opposition claiming the government is 'soft' on offending. A pair of Herald journalists have tried to get to the truth behind the political jousting.
One of the 42 ram raid robberies at Glengarry Wines. Photo: Supplied
On RNZ's Morning Report this week, Foodstuffs chief executive Chris Quin struck a sombre tone talking about what he called a "scary" rise in crime at the company's supermarkets.
"We've got a duty to keep customers and keep teams safe and when you see retail crime up 38 percent, serious assaults up 36 percent - and repeat offenders being responsible for over a third of retail crime, we absolutely have to acknowledge we have an issue," he said.
Some people raised eyebrows at the timing. A day earlier Consumer NZ had hit out at the supermarket giants over allegations they’re ripping customers off with “dodgy specials".
But he's not the first to air his concerns about rising retail crime in recent weeks.
The owners of Titirangi’s only post shop, Shrikant and Aboli Bhave gave a series of media interviews in May, saying they were closing their doors after two decades in business over repeated burglaries.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins, interviewed straight after the pair on the AM Show, told Ryan Bridge their story was "heartbreaking".
"I absolutely acknowledge the situation we're facing around retail crime with ram raids and aggravated robberies is utterly unacceptable," he said.
Those ram raids dominated the headlines last year, with some media outlets reporting what they called a “youth crime spike” or “youth crime wave”.
The barrage of coverage seems to have had an influence on people’s perceptions of crime.
On Monday this week, the Herald reported the results of an exclusive poll which showed 67 percent of New Zealanders were more concerned about being a victim of crime than they were five years ago.
Respondents were also asked what action they wanted to see to address crime.
The largest number – 34 percent – wanted harsher prison sentences while 27 percent wanted more police.
Only 4 percent wanted more social workers and other support, and 6 percent wanted a focus on rehabilitation rather than prison.
This may be understandable given the real rise in headline-grabbing types of crimes like ram raids, but it doesn't always mesh with the data released by authorities.
Police numbers showed youth crime was actually down 2 percent year on year in 2022, though there were big rises in South Auckland and Canterbury.
Open Justice reporter Ric Stevens weighs up youth crime headlines against the latest data. Photo: RNZ Mediawatch
Some of the 'tough on crime' solutions favoured by the public also failed to marry up with evidence of what made people safer.
For instance, last year polling showed 70 percent of people supported the idea of putting serious youth offenders in year-long boot camps.
University of Canterbury sociologist and gangs researcher Jarrod Gilbert looked at studies bringing together all the data on boot camps around the world and came to the conclusion they not only didn't work - they sometimes made the problem worse.
"The fact of the matter is that the research shows these sorts of programmes have very limited success or no success," he told TVNZ's Breakfast.
"The shorthand - and you've heard it here in the media - is that we make fitter, faster criminals."
Many of the daily stories on crime don’t include that kind of context or expert comment, and some commentators have aired concerns the unrelenting flow of alarming headlines was giving the public a distorted picture.
Criminologist Trevor Bradley told Stuff's Newsable podcast that research showed people perceived there to be less of a crime risk in their local area, even if the actual crime rates were high.
Meanwhile, they generally perceived the risk of crime in other areas to be high.
"Why? Well because they're relying on national media essentially and so their picture of crime was not experiential. It was totally learned or gleaned from the media," he said.
Last week, a pair of New Zealand Herald reporters laid out their best effort to get to the reality behind the crime reports.
Under the headline ‘Is Labour really soft on crime? The numbers reveal a surprising story’, data journalist Chris Knox and political reporter Michael Neilson collated stats from what they described as a vast array of sources on crime rates in New Zealand over the last 43 years.
They found reported victims of crime were up 11.9 percent since Labour came to power, while the number of offenders arrested is down 25.4 percent and convictions are down 26.2 percent.
So far, so good for those saying crime is out-of-control and Labour is failing to stop it.
But Knox and Neilson presented a lot of nuance behind their findings.
They said much of the increase in reported crime was due to a new system that allowed retailers to automatically notify police of minor offences that may previously have gone unreported.
And when it came to charges and convictions, John Key’s National government oversaw an even greater drop than Labour under Jacinda Ardern.
Neilson says the longer term data calls into question some common perceptions about our two major political parties' approaches to crime.
"It challenged the view that Labour is always soft, National is always tough. In the longer term, these claims don't really marry up with the stats. And in the shorter term there is evidence the government is taking a softer approach... but again those trends started before this government," he says.
Knox acknowledges that might be cold comfort to people who do feel more under threat.
Discussing the statistics is not always effective on such a highly emotive topic like crime, where many of the more data-driven solutions might not be intuitive, he says.
But he still sees value in looking at the underlying trends and challenging political narratives.
"People's reaction to crime and to feeling under threat is a strongly emotional reaction. Responding to that with facts and figures isn't necessarily going to change anyone's mind. That's not a reason not to have a thorough discussion of the data," he says.
Both Neilson and Knox say part of the gap between perception and reality on crime is down to the structural issues with media reporting highlighted by Trevor Bradley and others.
There's no easy fix for that, Neilson says.
"I think we'd be doing a disservice not to report some of these crimes, because we're definitely seeing a spike in some types of crime. We've seen an increase in truancy in schools and that's led to more youth out. There's a real issue there that we need to highlight," he says. "But maybe also we need to include that wider context that it is not part of the broader trend. It is a spike."
Part of the reason the media exists is to report rare events, if only to show readers their "lives aren't like that", Knox says. He sees data journalism as providing a kind of corrective.
"Data journalism exists to tell you what is and isn't a rare event. The challenge for us is how to make that interesting and how to do it in a way that doesn't lose our readers on line three."