Are the Government's policies having an impact on violent crime?

charged with murder. But the government is touting that violent crime is on the decline, years before their intended target. So I R streets really any safer? And is vibe more than policy influencing this Today on the Front Page ends at Herald's senior journalist Derek Cheng is with us to discuss the stats. Derek, So we've spoken to you before about the official New Zealand Crime and Victim Survey.

Now the full report isn't available publicly yet, but the government has already touted some of the key figures from it, haven't they.

of that target. There were twenty eight thousand fewer victims for that year to February compared to the year to October twenty twenty three. So it's not very surprising I guess that the government comes out and talks about what a great achievement this is, that their policies are working.

And I mean any politician would want to beat their chests whenever they've they've achieved, and even to pass this target, this target wasn't really you know, it's for twenty twenty nine, so we're four years ahead and well below the number, and that is you know, something that any politician would want to would want a song and dance about.

But the government didn't really allude to those when they said that the numbers are going to be volatile. What Justice Minister Paul goldsmanth said was these numbers are volatile. So when and if the numbers go up, it's basically Labour's fault, which is a typically political thing to say. When you ignore all the other factors and things are going well, then the government's doing very well. Thanks, thanks very much, Pats on the back. Things are going wrong.

It's the previous government's fault and things are going wrong despite what we're doing, and which is obviously a very colored political way of viewing things. So when Goldsmith talked about the vaults early the numbers, he didn't really talk about how things can go up and down. And there are so many factors involved in the equation of crime. He was really saying, it's they got off again. It's going to be Labour's fault.

clause there that's involved there. That includes limiting how many times you can get a discount for remorse or youth. It includes encouraging concurrent sentences if someone offends while they're on bail. So there's a number of there's a number of specific policies in that law change, and that's estimated to increase the prison population by I think thirteen hundred

additional prisoners in the next ten years. There's last year they passed the anti gang legislation which had a number of things and including the gang page ban for example. Obviously three strikes the second coming of three strikes is part of the restoring law and Order agenda. These things are actually alluded to by Godsmith when he talked about how our work is seeing great results in the reduction of these in the number of victims of violent crime.

He also talked about scrapping the state funding for the cultural reports. Cultural reports a sort of background information that can be given to a judge at sentencing and Minister of Justice and analysis shows that those reports on average usually led to attempercent discount and honest sentence.

collective effort from both ministers and their teams. But certainly the police, the corrections team, but also the general public as well. And so I just want to say thank you as we try and restore law and order in New Zealand. It's good to be celebrating or less acknowledging some of these milestones. Acknowledging also that we have a long way to go to get to where we need to get to.

But promise with Christopher Luxen in the announcement where they beat a their chests and said look how good we're doing in law or order, he said that the new tools for police to fight gangs were already quote unquote unearthing illegal guns and illegal drugs, but the means to do that was via a prohibition order, which a cork can hand down to a gang member if they violated

the gang patch three times. No such orders have been given, So he's saying that something's happened, which clearly hasn't happened. And as for the cultural reports, yes they have been they've had their state funding acts, but it's a really long stretch to say that that one thing could have led to a twenty seven percent reduction in the number

of victims of violent crime. So when I was interviewing Goldsmith about this and he was talking about how great the government was doing, I asked him, don't you think there are maybe factors independent of the government that might be contributing to this And he said, well, you know, obviously there are broader factors, and one very significant factor is the messaging from the government, as in the vibe is really important and it's a message that filters through

the entire system. And he said that, you know, acknowledging judicial independence, and the government can't tell a judge what sentence to give, it can only set the law, which the judiciary then interprets in handing down it.

to back up the things that they say. So we've talked about the New Zealand Crime and Victims Survey, and that's probably the most robust survey because it interviews thousands of New Zealander's age fifteen and over and it accounts for and in doing that it is able to account for unreported crime, and that is only about a quarter

of crime is ever actually reported to police. But in the latest announcement from the government, they're actually looking at quarterly results from that survey, which isn't meant to be an annual survey. In the footnotes themselves in the survey, they talk about the quarterly results having to take them with a bit of a pinch of salt because it's harder to standardize the results for the demographics of New Zealand on a quarterly basis than it is an annual basis.

So the quarterly results that they just announced where they had such a big reduction. It is very good news, obviously, but it is also like not as robust as the annual results. Annual results they were released earlier this year and it was up to i think the year to October twenty twenty four, and at that point the number of adult victims of violent crime was much higher than the latest quarterly results and has been more or less

the same since the survey started in twenty eighteen. There's been, you know, there's been a bit of ups and downs, but it's what they called no statistically significant difference, and it includes during the whole tenure that Labor was in office. Then there are other there are several other statistics. There are victimization reports to police, so if I go and report a crime to police, that's recorded as a victimization

to police. And National has used those statistics to show or to claim a rise in violent crime under Labor, but they're really only looking at one thing, and that some acts intended to cause injury, and it's true that those did rise a lot under Labor, But if you look at court data, which looked that people charged and people convicted, then those numbers are much more static. So the main takeaway from this is that there are a number of ways that we look at crime statistics, and

none of them are particularly definitive. Some are considered more robust than others, and overall you're generally looking for trends. The trends in crime data show a general reduction in crime pre pandemic years heading down to sort of twenty twenty two, and since then they've been rising, particularly in including a violent crime, and since maybe the middle of last year that has kind of appears to have picked. But then it's very early days looking at that data given that it's so recent.

you know, crime is often impulsive. It's often fueled by substance addictions, by trauma, and given those quite volatile factors, when it strikes, it's often spontaneous, impulsive, and quite random.

retail crime itself has been increasing. So the government is trying to crack down on retail crime and the first thing that they wanted to look at, and they wanted the Ministry Advisory Group to look at the citizens arrest So those powers are quite unclear. The Ministry Advisory Group, which you would expect, comes down or came down really strongly in favor of empowering citizens of rest even when

a crime hadn't taken place. You know, they wanted to empower citizens' rest when you had a reasonable belief that a crime was taking placement. Wasn't really prepared to go that for obvious reasons. They've instead sort of found in middle ground where they want to clarify those powers and broaden them and they hope that that will make a material difference. Whenever they have proposals that they asked irrelevant

officials to look them over. And the justice officials in this case were not exactly endorsing the government proposal here. They said that the proposal won't really have any desire, in fact, won't really have any impact on public safety, and came with a bunch of risks, and those included people making citizens arrests when police wouldn't make an arrest. And there could be a number of reasons for that, you know, for example, there's no evidence for police to

be able to pursue a prosecution. They said that there's a risk of escalating violence. We've already seen this when a dairy worker in Auckland was killed after he confronted someone who stole something from the shop and confronted them one hundred meters from the store and was stabbed and killed. So that's not to say that the citizens arrest powers

don't need to be clarified. The Justice officials actually said yes, it would be helpful to clarify them, but they didn't recommend going as far as the government did and is doing is they want to be able to for people to make a citizens arrest at any time of day and using any reasonable force, and that can include striking someone or causing them bodily harm if, for example, someone is resisting arrest. Currently, the citizens arrest provisions is restricted.

It needs to be an offense that carries the punishment of three years in jail, and for stolen goods, that needs to be stolen goods worth more than one thousand dollars, and you know you're not going to grab someone and see what's in their hands and then grab a calculator and see if that adds up to a thousand dollars. So there's definitely a case that those powers do need

to be clarified. The danger or the fear here is that it will lead to all kinds of vigilanty justice, which will actually make public safety matters worse rather than better.

firearms or firearms parts. This is a small problem, but an increasing problem in New Zealand police have confiscated a number of three D printed firearms and firearms parts and charged people with offenses, but they actually want a specific offense created where it's illegal to possess any blueprints for firearms parts and firearms themselves to be three D printed. That is still being consulted on. The government rewrite of the Arms Act is scheduled for some time this parliamentary term.

There's just been consultation on that over the summer period. A bill to enact what the government wants is probably not expected too much later this year and to be passed sometime next year. But it was interesting because I was speaking with the minister responsible for that rewright, Nicole McKee.

You know, she said she's really trying to look at a balance here because some of the three D printed innovation that she's seen by New Zealand companies is only happening in New Zealand and it could be a real boost for economic and small business growth. She talked about having visited somewhere that was making really lightweight stocks, which would be of huge interest to the Defense Force, huge interest to hunters, anyone who carries a lot of that

sort of equipment. You know, their loads could be a hell of a lot lighter. Obviously, she doesn't want criminals to be able to get your hands on that, So how you balance that from religious littive standpoint is a really difficult question. So we'll wait and see what the government comes up with it. In the meantime, police will still go after those three D printed guns and gun parts.