AKA: law & order, safety, police, policing, violence in society
Key notes
- There is no measure of all crime over many years. ‘Victimisations (police stations)’ is widely regarded as the best indicator.
- Days per month can vary from 28 to 31, so this impacts both the amount of crime and per capita crime in a month. All other things being equal, February months of 28 days should have 9.7% less crime than 31-day months. As such, we've applied an adjustment so that months can be compared fairly apples with apples. From July 2014, when the data began, until the end of August 2024, the latest data point the average number of days in a month is 30.451, so we have adjusted every month score shown above to this, e.g., 30.451/28 for February (outside leap years) and 30.451/31 for Decembers. For future months, this number will change slightly from 30.451, and we'll make that adjustment each month.
- Remember that each Labour-led or National-led government has had coalition partners that share the successes, and the failures, with them. A full list of governments for this time range is at the bottom of this page.
Data sources
Data shown:
- Victimisations per capita per month.
- July 2014 onwards, which is when this data series started.
Full data:
Frequency:
Updated:
- 2-month delay for victimisation data (1-month for offender data) and published on the last working day of each month
Last update:
Next update:
Why this KPI?
- There is no measurement of total crime over a long time.
- The best measurement the NZ Police have available is Victimisations (police stations) which goes back to July 2014 and is updated monthly with a 2-month delay.
- The downside of this victimisations data is that it is limited to the following 5 ANZSOC (Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology) Divisions:
- Acts Intended to Cause Injury (Assault)
- Sexual Assault and Related Offences
- Abduction, Harassment and Other Related Offences Against a Person
- Robbery, Extortion and Related Offences
- Theft and Related Offences
- The NZ Police make the “Note: Burglary victimisations are classified to property rather than the resident and have been excluded from the data”. We believe they should be included as there are always human victims from known burglaries.
- The following ANZSOC Divisions are also not included in the victimisation data:
- Homicide and Related Offences
- Dangerous or Negligent Acts Endangering Persons
- Fraud, Deception and Related Offences
- Miscellaneous Offences
- Offences Against Justice Procedures, Govt Sec and Gov Ops
- Property Damage and Environmental Pollution
- Public Order Offences
- Traffic and Vehicle Regulatory Offences
- Prohibited and Regulated Weapons and Explosive Devices [unlikely to have victims]
- From the NZ Police:
- ‘The Ministry of Justice survey shows that only about 25% is reported and with varying degree across different crime types.”
- ‘The 'Victimisations (police stations)' report has the complete dataset from July 2014.’
- Victimisations (demographics)' started almost a year later in June 2015.
- All other reports start too late, e.g. 2019-2020, or don't count all crimes.
Related facts
Wishlist
With support, we’ll be able to add multiple KPIs for each issue:
- Updates on many of KPIs listed above.
- NGL (National Gang List) total (older data here)
- Murder convictions (older data here)
- Police staff per capita (frontline vs. back office)
- Domestic violence
- Child abuse
- Prisoners per capita (needs to be paired with crime rates)
- Cases > Arrests > Charges > Convictions (per capita and then %s)
- Average sentences (by offence class)
- Reoffending
- Retail crime (hard to measure)
- Youth crime
Discarded
- Offender-based crime statistics. Offences are only measured if the offender is only if they've been caught. As such, offender statistics are more useful for working out crime rates and types by demographic.
Governments over the timeframe shown
- 2008 = National + ACT, United, Māori
2011 = National + ACT, United, Māori
2014 = National + ACT, United, Māori
- 2017 = Labour/NZ First + Green
2020 = Labour + Green
Sources:1,2 (table 5).
Data published by NZ Police
© Crown Copyright
Licensed for use under the creative commons attribution licence (BY) 4.0
If you spot a typo, mistake, or improvement opportunity for this page, please let us know via the comments below or contact us!
