Speaker 1: Hilda.
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: one of the key issues the coalition government was voted
Speaker 2: in on and it's easy to see why. The latest
Speaker 2: data shows overall crime is sitting steady, but despite barely
Speaker 2: moving figures, people are feeling more unsafe. The government wants
Speaker 2: to tackle crime and create fewer victims of violent offenses,
Speaker 2: but with law and order their key focus for the
Speaker 2: coming months, are they focusing on the right crimes to
Speaker 2: run us through the numbers and the policies. Today on
Speaker 2: the Front Page were joined by senior political journalist Derek Cheng.
Speaker 2: Crime in this country, Derek, people are sick of it.
Speaker 2: Aligne Prime Minister loves to shout from the rooftops, but
Speaker 2: people are actually sick of crime, aren't they.
Speaker 3: Well, it depends what you look at. So you know,
Speaker 3: there are lots of different measures for crime. There's no
Speaker 3: definitive crime data. And when you're looking at different crime
Speaker 3: data sources, the best thing is to look at the
Speaker 3: trends over time. So you know, the latest crime and
Speaker 3: Victim Survey for example, it includes unreported crime. You know
Speaker 3: a lot of crime is not reported, roughly three quarters
Speaker 3: of it, so it's considered one of the better crime statistics.
Speaker 3: And if you look at that survey, crime has been
Speaker 3: relatively steady since twenty eighteen, which was the first year
Speaker 3: of the survey, So about seventy percent of us say
Speaker 3: that we live crime free lives. But a different measure
Speaker 3: there on feeling unsafe. There's been a big increase in
Speaker 3: those of us who feel unsafe. That's gone from nine
Speaker 3: to fifteen percent over the last six years, with the
Speaker 3: biggest jump occurring between twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three.
Speaker 3: And it's also for victims and non victims, So there's
Speaker 3: a little weird thing going on there. But it's not
Speaker 3: uncommon for feelings of safety to not necessarily reflect the
Speaker 3: amount of crime that's going on, and there's lots of
Speaker 3: factors that are potentially at play there. So the proportion
Speaker 3: of Asian New Zealanders, for example, feeling unsafe doubled from
Speaker 3: eleven to twenty two percent over that time, and the
Speaker 3: surveys suggested that racism during COVID might have contributed to that.
Speaker 3: What does that mean for the government. While the steady
Speaker 3: rate of crime doesn't really fit with Luxin's narrative that
Speaker 3: crime is out of control. He much rather prefers to
Speaker 3: cherry pickers crime data to suit his message, and that,
Speaker 3: to be fair, is not uncommon for politicians. And those
Speaker 3: results also don't really sit with Luxen's lines about keewis
Speaker 3: don't feel safe in that homes. He's right that there's
Speaker 3: been an increase in feelings of not being safe, but
Speaker 3: I don't think anyone would take fifteen percent and just
Speaker 3: broadly say walky, we don't feel in their homes.
Speaker 2: It's interesting data, hey, when it comes out and those
Speaker 2: victim surveys, because you're right, when you look at it
Speaker 2: on the outset, you can't really see any obvious trends.
Speaker 2: But if you choose to zoom in on specifics, as in,
Speaker 2: you know, a youth crime, for instance, over this period
Speaker 2: these ages, you can if you zoom in and pinpoint
Speaker 2: some statistics, you can say that during this specific time
Speaker 2: youth crime got more serious. But like you say, if
Speaker 2: you zoom out, then it's a completely different picture.
Speaker 3: Well, I think that people's experience of crime is often
Speaker 3: a different picture entirely because if you are a victim
Speaker 3: of crime and that will affect you and then your
Speaker 3: household and you're you know, your wider circle. So you know,
Speaker 3: you're right that youth crime has been ticking up in
Speaker 3: recent years, and that's particularly prevalent in things like robberies
Speaker 3: and burglaries and theft, and you know that is in
Speaker 3: the statistics as well. But you know, even if overall
Speaker 3: crime is quite steady, how people experiencing it and how
Speaker 3: that goes through the grapevine the society is very different. So,
Speaker 3: like I said before, it is not that uncommon for
Speaker 3: people to feel less safe, even if the crime data
Speaker 3: doesn't really show that we are actually less safe.
Speaker 1: Look, we're seeing a lot in the media and coming
Speaker 1: up from police about, you know, a recent incidence of
Speaker 1: sort of increasingly younger people doing increasingly severe offending. The
Speaker 1: stats over the.
Speaker 2: Last few years actually show overall that youth crime offending
Speaker 2: numbers are decreasing, but what we're seeing.
Speaker 3: Is sort of worse offending.
Speaker 2: What challenge does it create for the government when people
Speaker 2: are more afraid of crime than actually experiencing it.
Speaker 3: Well, I think you know, a lot of politics, as
Speaker 3: retail politics, you have to respond to what the perceptions are.
Speaker 3: So you know, it suits. The Prime Minister Christopher Luxelm
Speaker 3: to say that crime is out of control and that
Speaker 3: people don't feel safe in their homes because that resonates
Speaker 3: with people, and then he can come in and say, well,
Speaker 3: this is our law and order agender, and we know
Speaker 3: these things are popular. So when we say we're going
Speaker 3: to crack down on gangs, yes, gang membership has gone up,
Speaker 3: largely because of the five oh one departies from Australia,
Speaker 3: so we're going to do something about that. Youth crime
Speaker 3: is up, so you know, we've got our boot camps,
Speaker 3: We've campaigned on them. Doesn't matter what the evidence says.
Speaker 3: In particular, because we see a problem, we all know
Speaker 3: there's a problem when we're going to do something about it.
Speaker 3: Three strikes, longer sentences, these are all things that resonate
Speaker 3: with the public. So it's a common political strategy to
Speaker 3: respond to the perceptions of what's going on out there,
Speaker 3: and this government's no different. Really.
Speaker 2: You've also seen another survey recently that details the types
Speaker 2: of crimes that people experience. Perhaps unsurprisingly, vehicle thefts and
Speaker 2: burglaries topped the charts.
Speaker 3: Hey, yeah, this is the episode survey and it was
Speaker 3: a global survey. They also talked to like a thousand
Speaker 3: New Zealanders and in New Zealand anyway, they didn't do
Speaker 3: it for New Zealand last year, so you can't only
Speaker 3: compare years. But it has a unique question where you know,
Speaker 3: have you seen or heard this particular thing in your
Speaker 3: neighborhood in the past twelve months. So vehicle theft, that
Speaker 3: particular crime has doubled according to the Crime and Victim Survey,
Speaker 3: so this also kind of aligned with that, saying that
Speaker 3: it was very visible. Three and five people have witnessed
Speaker 3: the vehicle theft fifty seven percent, burglars fifty six percent vandalism. Interestingly,
Speaker 3: forty four percent said they had seen or heard a
Speaker 3: gang in their neighborhood. But again we can't compare that
Speaker 3: with previous years because there's no data on the previous years,
Speaker 3: so we don't know if that's going up or down.
Speaker 2: Prime Minister chrispher Luxon previously said that he wants to
Speaker 2: see twenty thousand fewer victims of violent crimes such as assault,
Speaker 2: robbery and sexual assault. How has the government responded to
Speaker 2: these surveys.
Speaker 3: Well, this is quite interesting because assault, sexual assault, robbery
Speaker 3: they make up in the New Zealand crime and victims
Speaker 3: of violent offenses. But this is not the measure he
Speaker 3: likes to talk about every time he hears the words
Speaker 3: law and order. You know, I tried to ask him
Speaker 3: about this and the survey in particular recently, and you know,
Speaker 3: he doesn't really talk with you when you ask about
Speaker 3: law and order. He just talks at you. So his
Speaker 3: response every time is just ad nauseam. Violent crime is
Speaker 3: up thirty three percent.
Speaker 4: Crime has escalated in New Zealand over the last six years,
Speaker 4: and under a labor government that frankly has been very
Speaker 4: soft on crime. Since twenty seventeen, violent crime is up
Speaker 4: over thirty three percent. Serious assaults have more than doubled.
Speaker 4: Retail crime is up over one hundred percent. New Zealanders
Speaker 4: are not feeling safe from their own homes and their
Speaker 4: own businesses or their communities.
Speaker 3: But his measure here is victimizations police victimizations for specific
Speaker 3: offense acts intended to cause injury. And he's right, he's
Speaker 3: comparing the number in the year twenty seventeen with twenty
Speaker 3: twenty three and that's gone up thirty three percent. But
Speaker 3: you know this suits his message that things got so
Speaker 3: much worse under Labor. But if he chose, for example,
Speaker 3: the number of people charged or convicted for that particular offense,
Speaker 3: then the trend under Labor is steady or even decreasing.
Speaker 3: So let's say that he wanted to use violent offenses
Speaker 3: in the Crime and Victim Survey as his measure for
Speaker 3: the trend in crime under Labor. But under that survey,
Speaker 3: there's no significant difference in the proportion of kiwis experiencing
Speaker 3: those offenses when Labor was in office, so it doesn't
Speaker 3: suit his message. Having said that, there's been quite an
Speaker 3: increase in that specific measure violent defenses. There were twenty
Speaker 3: three thousand more victims in twenty twenty three compared to
Speaker 3: twenty twenty two, So his public service goal for twenty
Speaker 3: thirty is to reduce the number of victims by twenty thousand,
Speaker 3: But that actually isn't very ambitious because he just wants
Speaker 3: to dial it back to twenty twenty two levels. As
Speaker 3: for the government response to the survey, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith,
Speaker 3: he predictably said, well, that's why we need to get
Speaker 3: tough on crime, that's why we need longer sentences, that's
Speaker 3: why we need to smash the gangs, etc. You know,
Speaker 3: even though there are still questions about whether any of
Speaker 3: that policy agenda will make a difference.
Speaker 2: Three of their key law and order policies are around
Speaker 2: reintroducing the three strikes and boot camps for young offenders
Speaker 2: and making life more difficult for gangs. Now, is there
Speaker 2: any evidence that those policies will actually work well?
Speaker 3: Ministry of Justice officials put the proposed laws through the
Speaker 3: ringer and they've give an assessment of these things. When
Speaker 3: it comes to the anti gang stuff, the officials were
Speaker 3: pretty much a scathing as it gets. You know, there's
Speaker 3: no evidence they'll work. They might make things worse by
Speaker 3: creating more friction between gangs and the states, and it
Speaker 3: might end up in court, you know, if they challenge
Speaker 3: for breaching the Bill of Rights acts as far as
Speaker 3: three strikes go. They said that there was no significant
Speaker 3: quantifiable benefit for a policy that's going to cost millions
Speaker 3: of dollars. You know, this is exactly the thing that
Speaker 3: Luxen moraled against with labor, where they throw money at
Speaker 3: something even though it doesn't work. And those officials also
Speaker 3: challenged the government on a number of their favorite law
Speaker 3: and order slogans that longer sentences make people safer that
Speaker 3: the law is good for Maori because there will be
Speaker 3: few Maori victims, that it will deter crimes from happening,
Speaker 3: none of which has any evidential basis. Boot camps we've
Speaker 3: talked about a lot. You know, there's a bunch of
Speaker 3: academic research saying that they're the least effective tool when
Speaker 3: it comes to youth offending. They failed in the past
Speaker 3: under the last National government under John Key, where the
Speaker 3: reoffending rates were north of eighty percent, and where they
Speaker 3: have been good it tends to be because of the
Speaker 3: support that goes with the programs, nothing to do with
Speaker 3: the boot camp model itself, and we've also recently had
Speaker 3: all the inconsistency around whether the Defense Force will be involved.
Speaker 3: But having said that, you know, none of that means
Speaker 3: that the policy of the programs won't work. To say
Speaker 3: this that there's no evidence that they worked before doesn't
Speaker 3: necessarily mean that they didn't work. You know, three strikes
Speaker 3: version one might have stopped one gruesome crime from happening
Speaker 3: because someone was in prison for longer, and if that
Speaker 3: has happened, then Luxelon would probably say it was worth it.
Speaker 3: The problem there is that the crime might have just
Speaker 3: been delayed or redirected inside of prison, and that the
Speaker 3: harm over that criminal's lifetime hasn't diminished in any way.
Speaker 3: I think more generally, there are so many aspects that
Speaker 3: make up the crime equation, so it's impossible to say
Speaker 3: whether any one policy definitively did this thing to crime levels.
Speaker 3: There's also like a bunch of other things happening, like
Speaker 3: more visible police on the beat, the Social Investment Program,
Speaker 3: for example, a plan to tackle truancy. So you know,
Speaker 3: if there was less poverty, less truancy, less homelessness, crime
Speaker 3: would almost certainly go down, regardless of whatever policies that
Speaker 3: have no evidence behind them are enacted, or even in
Speaker 3: spite of them. It's not about gang pictures.
Speaker 2: Let's look at the ultimate course and the greatest violence
Speaker 2: you can inflict anybody.
Speaker 3: It's poverty. That's the ultimate pause.
Speaker 2: Clearly, people having their cars stolen and their homes broken
Speaker 2: into as a top concern for New Zealander's huge interest
Speaker 2: in The Herald's most Burgled street story the other day.
Speaker 2: Can those all be blamed on young offenders and gangs?
Speaker 3: I suppose, Well, that's quite hard to say, because police
Speaker 3: do gather data on crimes committed by people on the
Speaker 3: National Gangs List, but it's not publicly available, so it's
Speaker 3: not like you control through that data yourself. They released
Speaker 3: some stats recently. Gang members make up less than a
Speaker 3: quarter of a percent of the whole population, but they
Speaker 3: are responsible for sixteen percent of a robberies, eighteen percent
Speaker 3: of all serious violent crime, twenty five percent of all kidnapping.
Speaker 3: The biggest increases in the last decade were with assaults,
Speaker 3: but we know that gang membership has been on the rise,
Speaker 3: of some ten thousand gang members at the moment. Youth
Speaker 3: crime also has been rising globally following the increase of
Speaker 3: social isolation from the pandemic, and looking at youth offenses,
Speaker 3: there has been a big jump in theft in burglaries
Speaker 3: and robberies, So there's at least some correlation there between
Speaker 3: rising youth crime, more gang members and those types of offenses.
Speaker 3: You know, we've talked earlier about vehicle thefts being on
Speaker 3: the app and home burglaries there, so there's likely a
Speaker 3: correlation there. But when you're trying to look at blaming,
Speaker 3: you probably need to look at overall what the drivers
Speaker 3: of crime are, and that's a very complex intersection of
Speaker 3: lots of different things, poverty, housing, health, intergenerational trauma, educational opportunities,
Speaker 3: things like that. You know, there's a reason that politicians
Speaker 3: keep their slogans simple and snappy, that things are almost
Speaker 3: always much more complex than that.
Speaker 2: Can we legislate our way out of people getting their
Speaker 2: cars stolen or at least maybe put some more money
Speaker 2: towards free anti theft devices for car owners or something
Speaker 2: to make people safer. Would that be a better use
Speaker 2: of the government's money, do you think?
Speaker 3: You know, that's quite hard to say as well, because
Speaker 3: a lot of that type of policy is really kind
Speaker 3: of crystal ball gazing. One thing that the government is
Speaker 3: doing or wanting to do, is to put way more
Speaker 3: police on the beat. And we know that police visibility.
Speaker 3: I mean, if you're going to go and steal a
Speaker 3: car and you see a cop down the road, then
Speaker 3: you're probably going to think twice, right, So that's one
Speaker 3: way to boost the crime prevention tools. There's also obviously
Speaker 3: challenges around that because a bunch of our police are
Speaker 3: heading over to Australia and the government wants five hundred
Speaker 3: additional police officers by the end of next year. Whether
Speaker 3: they get to do that remains to be seen. And
Speaker 3: you know, police is also one of those departments that
Speaker 3: have had to penny pinch like all the other ones
Speaker 3: as well, So you know anti theft devices. I'm not sure.
Speaker 3: I haven't really seen any data on how effective those are.
Speaker 3: But I mean, if you're going to steal something and
Speaker 3: there's a lock across the steering wheel or something, then
Speaker 3: and the next car doesn't have one, then you're probably
Speaker 3: likely to skip that one and go on to the
Speaker 3: next one one.
Speaker 2: In ten Kiwei's experience fraud according to the crime and
Speaker 2: Victim surveys.
Speaker 3: Look is this really for real?
Speaker 1: And they said absolutely, there's no question in your our
Speaker 1: minds that you have been scammed.
Speaker 3: And then they say them, we can't recover it. Asb
Speaker 3: told Tim, his money was gone too. How much money
Speaker 3: had you invested?
Speaker 2: I invested four hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 4: It's a feeling of complete and utter loss, devastation, worse
Speaker 4: day of my life.
Speaker 2: Why aren't we hearing more from the government about tackling
Speaker 2: this issue when it's one of the most dominant unreported crimes.
Speaker 3: Well, if I'm being cynical, in short, I would just
Speaker 3: say that there aren't really many votes there. Fraud is
Speaker 3: the most common crime in New Zealand now it has
Speaker 3: doubled the proportion of Kiwi's experience for it has doubled
Speaker 3: in the last six years. But it's not something that
Speaker 3: really makes a lot of headlines. It doesn't make people's
Speaker 3: skin crawl. I guess when they're sitting at home watching TV,
Speaker 3: safe in their homes after work. You know, it doesn't
Speaker 3: stir up the kind of fear that makes people go
Speaker 3: to the ballot box and vote.
Speaker 2: What about family and domestic harm? This is a persistent
Speaker 2: issue in this country and it doesn't appear to be
Speaker 2: on top of any priority list, does it.
Speaker 3: No, that's right, and it's been a bit of an
Speaker 3: issue this year because police have said that they're stepping
Speaker 3: back from low level family violence callouts because they aren't
Speaker 3: and shouldn't be the state's tool for non crime social problems.
Speaker 3: But if nothing steps in there to fill that void,
Speaker 3: you know, those situations can easily escalate into more problematic
Speaker 3: ones and family violence. You know, it's a plague in
Speaker 3: New Zealand. But again being cynical here, those populations aren't
Speaker 3: really ones that vote very much, so it's not going
Speaker 3: to be as naturally on politicians, radar as other things
Speaker 3: that grab headlines and make people go to the ballot box.
Speaker 2: And given the rates of crime have barely changed in
Speaker 2: recent years, is the government fighting a losing battle to
Speaker 2: try and make us safer when it seems people's feelings
Speaker 2: don't really reflect reality anyway?
Speaker 3: I think you know, the government will see it self
Speaker 3: is winning if what they're doing resonates with the public.
Speaker 3: Right So if they're seem to be doing something, you know,
Speaker 3: the stuff that people are rightly or wrongly worried about,
Speaker 3: and that's youth crime. So they've got their boot camps,
Speaker 3: it's gangs, so they have their anti gang legislation. People
Speaker 3: think that sentences are two light. Surveys have shown that
Speaker 3: multiple times, so they're going to lengthen sentences. So whether
Speaker 3: they work or not is almost secondary. I mean, look
Speaker 3: at making it an aggravating factor. If you hit the cornerdiry,
Speaker 3: how many robbers are going to go into the corner
Speaker 3: diiry and look to see if there's more than one
Speaker 3: worker in there or if there's a home attached to it.
Speaker 3: Which are the factors that would make it an aggravating
Speaker 3: factor of sentencing. You know, no one's probably going to
Speaker 3: look at those things. That doesn't mean it doesn't look
Speaker 3: like the government isn't doing something to protect a sector
Speaker 3: of society who's rightly been set up with the RAM
Speaker 3: rays and the use attacks and the robberies. So a
Speaker 3: government can point to all the things that they're doing
Speaker 3: and they can give themselves a big tick as long
Speaker 3: as it resonates with the public. Of course, if crime
Speaker 3: then drops and people feel safe, that's obviously great, But
Speaker 3: there's so many things that go into that crime equation,
Speaker 3: and so it's impossible to say whether any policy is
Speaker 3: responsible for that. Of course, things could also get a
Speaker 3: lot worse, and they haven't over the last six years
Speaker 3: according to that crime and Victim survey. But if they
Speaker 3: do get a lot worse, then people will ultimately get disillusioned,
Speaker 3: feel less and less safe. But for the moment, that
Speaker 3: is a hypothetical problem for a second term.
Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us, Derek. That's it for this episode
Speaker 2: of the Front Page. You can read more about today's
Speaker 2: stories and extensive news coverage at enzet Herald dot co
Speaker 2: dot z. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Seals
Speaker 2: with sound engineer Patty Fox. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to
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Speaker 2: and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.