Crime statistics: September 2016
31 October 2016
This page contains some of the crime statistics we publish using New Zealand Police figures. We update the table
monthly.
Summary victimisation statistics
The table below shows the monthly total of victimisations, as well as the total for the latest 12 months, compared with
the previous 12-month period, and percentage changes.
Detailed tables with latest crime statistics
We publish four sets of detailed crime tables every month.
Use the links below to access interactive tables that you can configure in a variety of ways (eg by region, ethnicity,
relationship of offender to victim). We recommend using the victimisations table as a starting point for looking at
changes in frequency of six sets of crime with victims, including assault and theft.
Description of tables
The recorded crime victimisations table provides statistics about victims of crime, as recorded by New Zealand Police. Victimisation counts every time a person
or organisation is victimized for a given type of crime. For example, if an individual is the victim of theft three
times in May, this is recorded as three victimisations of ’theft and related offences’ in May of the relevant year. This
data does not include 'homicide and related offences' (which is published by NZ Police) or victimless offences such as
illicit drug use. The data is therefore a good measure of the frequency of offences that have victims.
We started publishing crime victim statistics in November 2014. This collection is based on an equivalent Australian
standard.
The unique victims table counts people or organisations once only – for the most serious offence they were a victim of. This is once for the
given reference period, regardless of how many times they were victimised. For example, if an individual is the victim
of assault and theft, they are counted as one unique victim for assault (the more-serious offence). Therefore this is a
good measure of the number of people and organisations that were a victim of crime in a 12-month period.
This data does not include ‘homicide and related offences’ (which is published by NZ Police) or victimless offences such
as illicit drug use. Unique victim data is displayed for ‘12-months ending’ periods; for example, figures under June
2016 include data from July 2015 to June 2016. We started publishing these statistics in July 2015.
The recorded crime proceedings table provides statistics about alleged offenders proceeded against by NZ Police. The number of proceedings does not
necessarily equate to the number of offenders or victims of crime. One offender can be proceeded against multiple times
for multiple crimes, or several individuals can each be proceeded against for the same crime. A proceeding is counted
for each separate date that Police proceed against an alleged offender
We began publishing these statistics in May 2015. This collection is based on the equivalent Australian standard.
The unique offenders table provides statistics about individual offenders who are counted once in the given reference period. This is regardless
of how many times they were dealt with by police. The data records offenders for their most-serious offence; for
example, if an offender was dealt with for theft and an assault in the same 12-month period, they would be counted once
– for the assault.
Unique offender data is displayed for ‘12-month ending’ periods; for example, figures under June 2016 include data from
July 2015 to June 2016. We began publishing these statistics in July 2015.
Confidentiality
To protect individuals' confidentiality, crime data undergoes a modified version of Statistics NZ's standard random
rounding to base 3. In the standard method, all counts are randomly rounded up or down to multiples of 3 (eg a count of
5 is displayed as 3 or 6, and a count of 1 as 0 or 3). In the modified version, 1s and 2s are always rounded up to 3.
Only zero counts are displayed as 0.
Ends