Editorial - Tuesday April 16, 2013

There go the stats

BROADLY speaking, the police in any community, and nationally, have two major obligations. One, which is advertised on the bodywork of many of its vehicles, is to make communities safer. This is achieved by arresting people who break the law, compiling evidence against them and putting them before the courts. Whether or not that actually makes a community safer is largely up to to the judicial system, a process over which the police have no control apart from ensuring that the evidence presented is as compelling as it can be.

The second obligation, imposed by the government of the day and implicit in making communities safer, is to drive criminal offending down. This is to be achieved, we are repeatedly told, by policing proactively rather than reactively, not so much by deterring would-be criminals or locking up the relatively few who are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime but by modifying the environment within which criminals thrive.

In Kaitaia, as elsewhere, that philosophy has been expressed by means including the forming of neighbourhood policing teams, made up of generally experienced officers whose task is to establish relationships not only with potential criminals but also victims, existing and potential, as a long-term investment in changing the way the community functions, and tolerates offending.

It is of immense importance to the government that this effort shows tangible results. The only way it can do that is via the annual reported/recorded crime statistics, which rose 0.9 per cent in Northland last year but fell, significantly, across the country, and not for the first time.

New Zealanders reportedly reported less crime last year than in any calendar year in almost a quarter of a century. Cause for political celebration, and perhaps public cynicism.

It is wise to handle any statistics emanating from the government and its agencies with care. Quite frankly, when it comes to recorded crime, statistics are meaningless. It is ridiculous to compare the number of criminal offences reported in 2012 with those of 1988, when New Zealand was a very different place, and when policing bore no resemblance whatsoever to that of 2012.

A comparison of the way in which the Kaitaia District Court functions and its predecessor, the Kaitaia Magistrate's Court, is telling. The Magistrate's Court sat two days every month, the first day being devoted to criminal offending, the second to traffic and everything else. 'Everything else' included the civil, children's and matrimonial jurisdictions, while the traffic agenda was always liberally sprinkled with the likes of social outcasts who had had the temerity to drive a car without registration or a warrant of fitness.

In the late 1970s/early 1980s Kaitaia's constabulary comprised a sergeant and four constables. There was no CIB; they came over the hill from Kaikohe as and when they were needed, which was rarely. The local force had one police car (but there were a couple of traffic cops). Today's official establishment is probably close to 30.

Obviously that goes back a little further than 24 years, which according to the government was the last time reported crime was as low as it was in 2012, but not much.

Those were the days when everything that could possibly be interpreted as a crime, or an offence against the Transport Act, found its way to the courthouse. There were no pre-charge warnings, fewer traffic tickets and no suggestion that some offences, such as low-level cannabis offending, were too petty to worry about.

Kaitaia, like every other town in New Zealand, is a demonstrably less safe place in which to live now than it was then. That is not the fault of the police or anyone else. It's just the way things are, although some blame could probably go to governments past, given that the Labour administration that won the 1984 election effectively invented unemployment, but it would be fair to say that prior to 1984 New Zealand was living on borrowed time, and all David Lange did was open the door to reality.

It would be fair to say too that if crime statistics were to be published as a book they would not be found in the library's non-fiction section. Does that matter? Yes it does. It matters because at a time when New Zealanders show every sign of becoming inured to serious criminal offending they are being told that there is actually cause for celebration. Not only do the government and its police force have a lid on serious crime, we are told, but offending rates are actually falling. Whatever our eyes and ears might tell us, this is not a good time to be a criminal in New Zealand. Cue the Tui ad.

However, it might well be fair to say that this is not a good time to be a serious criminal within the boundaries of the Kaitaia CIB and its various branches. The flow of new offenders who appear before the District Court registrar every second week shows no sign of depletion, but some very heavy charges have been laid in that court over recent months, evidence that the plain clothes officers in this community are doing a good job.

In fact eight of their arrests accounted for some 2.2 per cent of recorded crime in Northland in 2012. With those arrests crime rose 0.9 per cent; without them, according to the writer's calculations, it would have fallen 1.3 per cent. (A little licence has been taken there, in that some of those charges were laid this calendar year, but you get the point).

Those charges, all alleging sexual or drug offending, clearly did not come easy. They were the result of hundreds, probably thousands of hours of painstaking investigation, the careful accumulation of evidence to the point where charges could be laid and alleged offenders placed before the court. Only two of those arrestees have been convicted at this stage, and while there can be many a slip twixt arrest and conviction, the police have just about done their bit. And in doing so they have made a tangible contribution to making their community a safer one.

For that they should be thanked and congratulated, although it's not entirely out of the question that their efforts, and results, will have caused concern in some quarters, in that the laying of multiple charges may not be seen as compatible with the need to reduce the rate of criminal offending as portrayed by statistics. Therein lies the real danger of stats, or more properly the real danger in giving them greater weight than they warrant.

Remember, the statistical rise and fall of recorded crime actually means nothing to anyone whose job doesn't depend upon them, like a Minister of Police or senior member of the police administration. Beyond the realms of Parliament and police HQ they have no value. Those who aren't politicians or policemen are more likely to assess levels of crime by their own experiences and impressions gained from the media.

Statistics' only value lies in giving a governing political party the chance to crow, and opposition parties the chance to criticise. And therein lies the motivation for ensuring that the stats look good for the former and unpromising for the latter.

The writer believes crime stats are utterly meaningless, and that a far better gauge of how the war against crime is going is to be had from the local criminal court list. Over recent months, in Kaitaia at least, those lists have made very good reading indeed.