Editorial: A good rise in crime

Lies, damn lies and statistics.

It's a phrase popularly attributed to Mark Twain.

What, I wonder would Twain - an author and journalist - make of the country's annual police statistics released yesterday. Specifically, what would he make of the common annual assertion around increases in crimes being attributed to lower community tolerance and, therefore, greater numbers of complaints being made.

It's an assertion that essentially says: "The incidents of crime haven't risen within the community, just the reported incidents."

As a young police reporter, I once asked a senior sergeant if a crime dropped, did it mean people weren't bothering to report those offences anymore?

I knew the police officer well enough to cheekily suggest the notion. I got what Twain might have referred to as "short shrift".

It was a silly notion not worth considering, he reckoned.

However, what is worth considering, is that when to comes to domestic violence and associated offences, police are right - community intolerance is growing.

Northland's crime statistics released yesterday for 2012 showed harassment and threatening behaviour offences rose from 479 to 677 offences.

That intolerance has come from police work and community groups getting behind campaigns such as It's Not OK and White Ribbon. In general, the message is getting through to family and friends of domestic violence - it's a crime that is not OK.

It is also the one crime we should hope to see increase annually until, of course, some form of tipping point is reached and the incidents of domestic violence within the community reduce.

Hopefully, that tipping point is in the not-too-distant future, as generational domestic violence subsides, and generational intolerance grows.