Stewart Forsyth: Who is really tough on crime?

National Party leader Christopher Luxon unveiled a new "lock 'em up" crime policy during a press conference in central Auckland. Photo / Alex Burton

OPINION

Being tough on crime is an election issue. Crime is shockingly visible. One of the bizarre aspects of the 21st century is that security cameras and social media enable us to watch (sometimes many times over) criminals flaunting their criminality. With such behaviour streaming into us, we can’t ignore crime.

National has strongly endorsed a tough-on-crime agenda. But do National-led governments deliver a tough response to crime? NZ Herald journalists Chris Knox and Michael Neilson wrote an intriguing piece on June 1 that indicated the reality (in terms of offenders charged and also convicted) was not as the rhetoric might imply. Counter-intuitively, Labour governments were the ones that ramped up the charging and conviction results. It appeared that National governments eased off on fighting crime.

I wondered if this difference in arrests and sentences was purely a government policy difference. Perhaps these differences reflected underlying socioeconomic trends that were affecting nationwide criminality. Maybe the nine years while John Key was Prime Minister, were years when arrests and convictions drifted down annually because the criminal climate was particularly benign. What if the crime wave had peaked towards the end of Helen Clark’s nine-year era and then receded? How to get a line on such trends?

Illustration / Daron Parton

Economist Arthur Okun introduced the Misery Index to the US in the 1960s. This Index is an indication of socioeconomic pain, especially for those lower in the social hierarchy. The Misery Index combines inflation and unemployment (some also add other factors such as bank lending rates and changes in economic growth).

In wealthy countries, the higher the Misery Index, the less happy their people are. There is also a strong relationship with crime. More misery, it seems, means more crime.

Was there a link in New Zealand between the Misery Index and criminal charges and convictions over the years? Well, no and yes, respectively. There was no relationship between New Zealand’s Misery Index (of unemployment and inflation combined) and the annual number of people charged with offences. There was a significant effect of the Misery Index on the annual level of convictions. This effect explains 29 per cent of the movement in the numbers sentenced. This suggests that the rate of convictions reflects actual crime, driven in part by economic and social forces.

It is not complicated to subtract this Misery effect from the actual numbers sentenced each year, so revealing whether the year-on-year rates of sentencing are influenced by government policy rather than the background economic situation. And whether that policy is different from government to government.

This simple subtraction is of course purely a statistical abstraction. Just because the result in some years is a negative number of convictions does not mean that a cabal of evil mathematicians is fudging the national figures.

The chart Knox and Neilson used to illustrate their results indicates that convictions and charges ramp up when Labour is in power, and drift down with National at the wheel.

Despite these bumps, the chart is notable for showing the gradual reduction in charges and convictions over the 1980 to 2022 period – from more than 135,000 convictions in 1980 to around 47,000 42 years later. That’s a big drop.

I have simplified things by comparing the conviction rates over the periods National and Labour were in government. There is a difference in “actual” convictions of 4 per cent - with National ahead. What if we subtract the Misery effect? The difference still favours National in terms of the number of convictions – by 3 per cent. These differences are small, and a long way from statistical significance.

Stewart Forsyth.

At the end of the day or the end of particular political eras, governments don’t appear to make a noticeable difference to the actual level of convictions.

It seems that no matter which government is in power, the level of convictions is going down. And that’s true when we strip out the impact of the Misery Index. In the immediate term, political tacticians should note – New Zealand’s Misery Index has gone up, in relative terms anyway.

From being one of the lowest in the international misery rankings (last year we were in the lowest 4 per cent of 156 countries), we are making our way up – now we’re in the lowest 67 per cent - in fact in the top third for misery. Not a great place for an incumbent government.

- Stewart Forsyth is a leadership coach and writes a Substack Newsletter.