Despite talk of rampant youth crime, Generation Z - that cohort of New Zealanders now in their teens and early 20s - are less likely to get into trouble with the law than any other age group in decades.
There are a small number of them who do flout the law and they tend to do it spectacularly, often by ramming a stolen vehicle into a shop and posting about it on TikTok.
This offending is highly visible, and it has a big impact on the besieged shop owners and communities around them, which is why the public rightly get alarmed.
Generally, people believe youth crime is getting worse. Surveys suggest 87 percent of New Zealanders believe it has increased in the past five years. This belief, however, is contrary to what statistics tell us.
Overall, Ministry of Justice data shows youth crime rates dropping year on year.
The trend is not always consistent, and there has been a significant post-Covid uptick, but the number of children and youths aged 16 or under coming before the courts has halved over the past decade.
This matches my intuition and experience, but the people who really need to hear this have (rightly or wrongly) stopped trusting these statistics
This is great and long may out continue.
I struggle to grasp it beside the general state of apathy I see in NZ, but maybe that’s cos I’m technically one of the old guard?
Either way, this looks like much needed progress, frankly
I can think of an optimistic and a pesamistic reason for this.
- The 24 hour media cycle makes things a lot more visible, so it feels like crime is worse because now we know about every incident even though crime is reducing.
- Changing police discretion policies means less minor crime is recorded as crime (say perhaps if someone was caught shoplifting gum, in the past they might have been written up by the police but now they just get told not to do it again. Or perhaps a lack of police action means shops don’t bother calling the police anymore).
It’s also worth noting that the article compares two pre-COVID years, and also states that post-COVID crime has gotten worse so as I understand it, if you compare now vs 5 years ago crime is worse, but it you compare vs 10 or 20 years ago then crime rates are lower. The long term drop in crime is masked by the short term increase.
You always have such a full and reasoned take, Dave. I’m really impressed at your curiosity (I’m so jaded I stop caring way too quickly)
I do my best! I have quite some experience working with data, so I know that whatever data you’re being shown, the real story is more complex.
The younger generation just seem to be getting in less trouble overall, less crime, less teen pregnancy, less dumb shit altogether. It’s good to see actually.
