Speaker 1: Kioda.
Speaker 2: I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a
Speaker 2: daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. Crime is
Speaker 2: a constant hot topic of debate in New Zealand, one
Speaker 2: that is rarely far from the front pages. The recent
Speaker 2: alleged murder of University of Auckland student Kyl Warrell in
Speaker 2: Auckland has served as a reminder of the randomness that
Speaker 2: comes with violent crime, with a sixteen year old now
Speaker 2: charged with murder. But the government is touting that violent
Speaker 2: crime is on the decline, years before their intended target.
Speaker 2: So I R streets really any safer? And is vibe
Speaker 2: more than policy influencing this Today on the Front Page
Speaker 2: ends at Herald's senior journalist Derek Cheng is with us
Speaker 2: to discuss the stats. Derek, So we've spoken to you
Speaker 2: before about the official New Zealand Crime and Victim Survey.
Speaker 2: Now the full report isn't available publicly yet, but the
Speaker 2: government has already touted some of the key figures from it,
Speaker 2: haven't they.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So they came out and they were like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is an amazing result. We've seen an enormous reduction
Speaker 1: in the number of victims of violent crime and they
Speaker 1: have a public service target to reduce that number by
Speaker 1: twenty thousand compared to when the government took office in
Speaker 1: October twenty twenty three. And the latest figures, which was
Speaker 1: a quarter the result, which shows the numbers in the
Speaker 1: year to February, showed that they were actually already ahead
Speaker 1: of that target. There were twenty eight thousand fewer victims
Speaker 1: for that year to February compared to the year to
Speaker 1: October twenty twenty three. So it's not very surprising I
Speaker 1: guess that the government comes out and talks about what
Speaker 1: a great achievement this is, that their policies are working.
Speaker 1: And I mean any politician would want to beat their
Speaker 1: chests whenever they've they've achieved, and even to pass this target,
Speaker 1: this target wasn't really you know, it's for twenty twenty nine,
Speaker 1: so we're four years ahead and well below the number,
Speaker 1: and that is you know, something that any politician would
Speaker 1: want to would want a song and dance about.
Speaker 2: Well, the government did admit that these numbers are volatile,
Speaker 2: though what does that mean really, Well, the.
Speaker 1: Numbers are volatile because any crime is a really complete expecture, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, and Bible crime in particular, there's multiple factors
Speaker 1: that feed into that equation and that they go far
Speaker 1: beyond what a government is doing. They include access to
Speaker 1: healthcare or good housing or good education. It's what the
Speaker 1: economy is doing, what household disposable income is or is not.
Speaker 1: The numbers will go up and down because there are
Speaker 1: so many intersecting factors into you know, the levels of crime.
Speaker 1: But the government didn't really allude to those when they
Speaker 1: said that the numbers are going to be volatile. What
Speaker 1: Justice Minister Paul goldsmanth said was these numbers are volatile.
Speaker 1: So when and if the numbers go up, it's basically
Speaker 1: Labour's fault, which is a typically political thing to say.
Speaker 1: When you ignore all the other factors and things are
Speaker 1: going well, then the government's doing very well. Thanks, thanks
Speaker 1: very much, Pats on the back. Things are going wrong.
Speaker 1: It's the previous government's fault and things are going wrong
Speaker 1: despite what we're doing, and which is obviously a very
Speaker 1: colored political way of viewing things. So when Goldsmith talked
Speaker 1: about the vaults early the numbers, he didn't really talk
Speaker 1: about how things can go up and down. And there
Speaker 1: are so many factors involved in the equation of crime.
Speaker 1: He was really saying, it's they got off again. It's
Speaker 1: going to be Labour's fault.
Speaker 2: Tackling law and order has been a major focus of
Speaker 2: this government. Can you remind us of some of the
Speaker 2: policies that they've introduced.
Speaker 1: Well, the most recent one was the passing of the
Speaker 1: sentencing reforms. There's a number of policies from National and
Speaker 1: in the coalition agreements with Newdyland First and the Act
Speaker 1: Party which are designed to basically LinkedIn sentences and stop
Speaker 1: what the government says is the the two leniency sentences
Speaker 1: that happened under Labour's watch. Those include like capping the
Speaker 1: maximum discount the judge can go at forty percent. There
Speaker 1: is a sort of manifestly unjust get out of jail
Speaker 1: clause there that's involved there. That includes limiting how many
Speaker 1: times you can get a discount for remorse or youth.
Speaker 1: It includes encouraging concurrent sentences if someone offends while they're
Speaker 1: on bail. So there's a number of there's a number
Speaker 1: of specific policies in that law change, and that's estimated
Speaker 1: to increase the prison population by I think thirteen hundred
Speaker 1: additional prisoners in the next ten years. There's last year
Speaker 1: they passed the anti gang legislation which had a number
Speaker 1: of things and including the gang page ban for example.
Speaker 1: Obviously three strikes the second coming of three strikes is
Speaker 1: part of the restoring law and Order agenda. These things
Speaker 1: are actually alluded to by Godsmith when he talked about
Speaker 1: how our work is seeing great results in the reduction
Speaker 1: of these in the number of victims of violent crime.
Speaker 1: He also talked about scrapping the state funding for the
Speaker 1: cultural reports. Cultural reports a sort of background information that
Speaker 1: can be given to a judge at sentencing and Minister
Speaker 1: of Justice and analysis shows that those reports on average
Speaker 1: usually led to attempercent discount and honest sentence.
Speaker 3: Great to be here with our Minister of Justice and
Speaker 3: Minister of Police, Paul Gosmith and Martin Mitchell. And the
Speaker 3: reason is that also some good encouraging signs. I think
Speaker 3: some good early encouraging momentum around the reduction and trying
Speaker 3: to meet our reduction of twenty thousand victims of violent
Speaker 3: crime being reduced by twenty twenty nine, and we're making
Speaker 3: some good progress on that, and I think that's a
Speaker 3: collective effort from both ministers and their teams. But certainly
Speaker 3: the police, the corrections team, but also the general public
Speaker 3: as well. And so I just want to say thank
Speaker 3: you as we try and restore law and order in
Speaker 3: New Zealand. It's good to be celebrating or less acknowledging
Speaker 3: some of these milestones. Acknowledging also that we have a
Speaker 3: long way to go to get to where we need
Speaker 3: to get to.
Speaker 2: If not the government policies, then what is contributing to
Speaker 2: this decrease? Do you think can they take credit for
Speaker 2: the vibe that they're putting out there, as Justice Minister
Speaker 2: Paul Goldsmith said to.
Speaker 1: You, Well, an important point in all of these policies
Speaker 1: that Goldsmith cited is that they haven't really taken effect yet.
Speaker 1: So they passed their sentencing reforms, but they don't come
Speaker 1: into effect until the end of Journe three strikes two
Speaker 1: point zero. Even though the legislation was passed at the
Speaker 1: end of last year, it doesn't commence until the middle
Speaker 1: of June. The anti gang legislation has been in force.
Speaker 1: But promise with Christopher Luxen in the announcement where they
Speaker 1: beat a their chests and said look how good we're
Speaker 1: doing in law or order, he said that the new
Speaker 1: tools for police to fight gangs were already quote unquote
Speaker 1: unearthing illegal guns and illegal drugs, but the means to
Speaker 1: do that was via a prohibition order, which a cork
Speaker 1: can hand down to a gang member if they violated
Speaker 1: the gang patch three times. No such orders have been given,
Speaker 1: So he's saying that something's happened, which clearly hasn't happened.
Speaker 1: And as for the cultural reports, yes they have been
Speaker 1: they've had their state funding acts, but it's a really
Speaker 1: long stretch to say that that one thing could have
Speaker 1: led to a twenty seven percent reduction in the number
Speaker 1: of victims of violent crime. So when I was interviewing
Speaker 1: Goldsmith about this and he was talking about how great
Speaker 1: the government was doing, I asked him, don't you think
Speaker 1: there are maybe factors independent of the government that might
Speaker 1: be contributing to this And he said, well, you know,
Speaker 1: obviously there are broader factors, and one very significant factor
Speaker 1: is the messaging from the government, as in the vibe
Speaker 1: is really important and it's a message that filters through
Speaker 1: the entire system. And he said that, you know, acknowledging
Speaker 1: judicial independence, and the government can't tell a judge what
Speaker 1: sentence to give, it can only set the law, which
Speaker 1: the judiciary then interprets in handing down it.
Speaker 2: Sentence, what are the stats have you seen?
Speaker 1: Well, I mean crime stats are really crime stats are
Speaker 1: a real puzzle or right, because there's multiple different stats
Speaker 1: and politicians love to cherry pick whatever stats they want
Speaker 1: to back up the things that they say. So we've
Speaker 1: talked about the New Zealand Crime and Victims Survey, and
Speaker 1: that's probably the most robust survey because it interviews thousands
Speaker 1: of New Zealander's age fifteen and over and it accounts
Speaker 1: for and in doing that it is able to account
Speaker 1: for unreported crime, and that is only about a quarter
Speaker 1: of crime is ever actually reported to police. But in
Speaker 1: the latest announcement from the government, they're actually looking at
Speaker 1: quarterly results from that survey, which isn't meant to be
Speaker 1: an annual survey. In the footnotes themselves in the survey,
Speaker 1: they talk about the quarterly results having to take them
Speaker 1: with a bit of a pinch of salt because it's
Speaker 1: harder to standardize the results for the demographics of New
Speaker 1: Zealand on a quarterly basis than it is an annual basis.
Speaker 1: So the quarterly results that they just announced where they
Speaker 1: had such a big reduction. It is very good news, obviously,
Speaker 1: but it is also like not as robust as the
Speaker 1: annual results. Annual results they were released earlier this year
Speaker 1: and it was up to i think the year to
Speaker 1: October twenty twenty four, and at that point the number
Speaker 1: of adult victims of violent crime was much higher than
Speaker 1: the latest quarterly results and has been more or less
Speaker 1: the same since the survey started in twenty eighteen. There's been,
Speaker 1: you know, there's been a bit of ups and downs,
Speaker 1: but it's what they called no statistically significant difference, and
Speaker 1: it includes during the whole tenure that Labor was in office.
Speaker 1: Then there are other there are several other statistics. There
Speaker 1: are victimization reports to police, so if I go and
Speaker 1: report a crime to police, that's recorded as a victimization
Speaker 1: to police. And National has used those statistics to show
Speaker 1: or to claim a rise in violent crime under Labor,
Speaker 1: but they're really only looking at one thing, and that
Speaker 1: some acts intended to cause injury, and it's true that
Speaker 1: those did rise a lot under Labor, But if you
Speaker 1: look at court data, which looked that people charged and
Speaker 1: people convicted, then those numbers are much more static. So
Speaker 1: the main takeaway from this is that there are a
Speaker 1: number of ways that we look at crime statistics, and
Speaker 1: none of them are particularly definitive. Some are considered more
Speaker 1: robust than others, and overall you're generally looking for trends.
Speaker 1: The trends in crime data show a general reduction in
Speaker 1: crime pre pandemic years heading down to sort of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two, and since then they've been rising, particularly in
Speaker 1: including a violent crime, and since maybe the middle of
Speaker 1: last year that has kind of appears to have picked.
Speaker 1: But then it's very early days looking at that data
Speaker 1: given that it's so recent.
Speaker 2: Obviously, we mentioned o Worrel in the intro and while
Speaker 2: that's obviously still a developing case, it is believed to
Speaker 2: be a random attack. At this stage. There's not really
Speaker 2: anything that can the government can do to police random attacks,
Speaker 2: though is there not directly?
Speaker 1: They can do things in general that can help to
Speaker 1: address things like that. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: Police Minister Mitchell said when he was talking about the
Speaker 1: reduction and violent crime victims was that there's been a
Speaker 1: forty percent increase in police on the beat and having
Speaker 1: more police on the beat visible on the streets has
Speaker 1: been shown to be effective and generally making communities feel
Speaker 1: safer and being more of a deterrent towards crime. But
Speaker 1: you know, crime is often impulsive. It's often fueled by
Speaker 1: substance addictions, by trauma, and given those quite volatile factors,
Speaker 1: when it strikes, it's often spontaneous, impulsive, and quite random.
Speaker 2: Even There are some other plans in their early stages
Speaker 2: at the moment the government wants to work on. One
Speaker 2: is expanding citizen arrest powers, which we've talked about before
Speaker 2: on this podcast, but I understand that the Ministry of
Speaker 2: Justice isn't a huge fan of it.
Speaker 1: So this was work that started with consultation with the
Speaker 1: Ministry or Advisory Group for victims of retail crime. Retail
Speaker 1: crime has been on the rise quite significantly. Part of
Speaker 1: that is down to better reporting mechanisms. The system AURA,
Speaker 1: which police introduced, has made it much easier to report
Speaker 1: retail crime, but there is also a general feeling that
Speaker 1: retail crime itself has been increasing. So the government is
Speaker 1: trying to crack down on retail crime and the first
Speaker 1: thing that they wanted to look at, and they wanted
Speaker 1: the Ministry Advisory Group to look at the citizens arrest
Speaker 1: So those powers are quite unclear. The Ministry Advisory Group,
Speaker 1: which you would expect, comes down or came down really
Speaker 1: strongly in favor of empowering citizens of rest even when
Speaker 1: a crime hadn't taken place. You know, they wanted to
Speaker 1: empower citizens' rest when you had a reasonable belief that
Speaker 1: a crime was taking placement. Wasn't really prepared to go
Speaker 1: that for obvious reasons. They've instead sort of found in
Speaker 1: middle ground where they want to clarify those powers and
Speaker 1: broaden them and they hope that that will make a
Speaker 1: material difference. Whenever they have proposals that they asked irrelevant
Speaker 1: officials to look them over. And the justice officials in
Speaker 1: this case were not exactly endorsing the government proposal here.
Speaker 1: They said that the proposal won't really have any desire,
Speaker 1: in fact, won't really have any impact on public safety,
Speaker 1: and came with a bunch of risks, and those included
Speaker 1: people making citizens arrests when police wouldn't make an arrest.
Speaker 1: And there could be a number of reasons for that,
Speaker 1: you know, for example, there's no evidence for police to
Speaker 1: be able to pursue a prosecution. They said that there's
Speaker 1: a risk of escalating violence. We've already seen this when
Speaker 1: a dairy worker in Auckland was killed after he confronted
Speaker 1: someone who stole something from the shop and confronted them
Speaker 1: one hundred meters from the store and was stabbed and killed.
Speaker 1: So that's not to say that the citizens arrest powers
Speaker 1: don't need to be clarified. The Justice officials actually said yes,
Speaker 1: it would be helpful to clarify them, but they didn't
Speaker 1: recommend going as far as the government did and is
Speaker 1: doing is they want to be able to for people
Speaker 1: to make a citizens arrest at any time of day
Speaker 1: and using any reasonable force, and that can include striking
Speaker 1: someone or causing them bodily harm if, for example, someone
Speaker 1: is resisting arrest. Currently, the citizens arrest provisions is restricted.
Speaker 1: It needs to be an offense that carries the punishment
Speaker 1: of three years in jail, and for stolen goods, that
Speaker 1: needs to be stolen goods worth more than one thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: and you know you're not going to grab someone and
Speaker 1: see what's in their hands and then grab a calculator
Speaker 1: and see if that adds up to a thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: So there's definitely a case that those powers do need
Speaker 1: to be clarified. The danger or the fear here is
Speaker 1: that it will lead to all kinds of vigilanty justice,
Speaker 1: which will actually make public safety matters worse rather than better.
Speaker 4: Legislative changes introduced in twenty twenty play stay heavy regulatory
Speaker 4: burden on these volunteers. While some of these changes have
Speaker 4: been positive, others went beyond what is necessary to ensure
Speaker 4: public safety. I've heard from club members and range operators
Speaker 4: that this regulatory burden is too high it may force
Speaker 4: some to consider closure. This bill simplifies the regulatory requirements
Speaker 4: for clubs and rangers to reduce the burden on operators
Speaker 4: while maintaining safety requirements.
Speaker 2: And I believe there are ongoing revisions to the gun
Speaker 2: safety laws and three D printed guns are one of
Speaker 2: the latest talking points here. Can you tell me what's
Speaker 2: happening around that?
Speaker 1: Well, the government has agreed with the National Party has
Speaker 1: agreed with the Egg Party to rewrite the Arms Act.
Speaker 1: The Arms Act is I think forty two years old
Speaker 1: and is no longer as well out of date basically,
Speaker 1: and it has no provisions for three D printing of
Speaker 1: firearms or firearms parts. This is a small problem, but
Speaker 1: an increasing problem in New Zealand police have confiscated a
Speaker 1: number of three D printed firearms and firearms parts and
Speaker 1: charged people with offenses, but they actually want a specific
Speaker 1: offense created where it's illegal to possess any blueprints for
Speaker 1: firearms parts and firearms themselves to be three D printed.
Speaker 1: That is still being consulted on. The government rewrite of
Speaker 1: the Arms Act is scheduled for some time this parliamentary term.
Speaker 1: There's just been consultation on that over the summer period.
Speaker 1: A bill to enact what the government wants is probably
Speaker 1: not expected too much later this year and to be
Speaker 1: passed sometime next year. But it was interesting because I
Speaker 1: was speaking with the minister responsible for that rewright, Nicole McKee.
Speaker 1: You know, she said she's really trying to look at
Speaker 1: a balance here because some of the three D printed
Speaker 1: innovation that she's seen by New Zealand companies is only
Speaker 1: happening in New Zealand and it could be a real
Speaker 1: boost for economic and small business growth. She talked about
Speaker 1: having visited somewhere that was making really lightweight stocks, which
Speaker 1: would be of huge interest to the Defense Force, huge
Speaker 1: interest to hunters, anyone who carries a lot of that
Speaker 1: sort of equipment. You know, their loads could be a
Speaker 1: hell of a lot lighter. Obviously, she doesn't want criminals
Speaker 1: to be able to get your hands on that, So
Speaker 1: how you balance that from religious littive standpoint is a
Speaker 1: really difficult question. So we'll wait and see what the
Speaker 1: government comes up with it. In the meantime, police will
Speaker 1: still go after those three D printed guns and gun parts.
Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us, Derek Cool. That's it for this
Speaker 2: episode of the Front Page. You can read more about
Speaker 2: today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzherld dot co
Speaker 2: dot nz. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Sills
Speaker 2: and Richard Martin, who is also a sound engineer. I'm
Speaker 2: Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to The Front Page on iHeartRadio or
Speaker 2: wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for
Speaker 2: another look behind the headlines.