Beating up the facts on crime

Phil Chitty of Customs with imported weapons. Picture / Geoff Dale

Pick up the paper, listen to the news and chances are there will be a report about someone who has been beaten to death. This week the former boyfriend of 18-year-old Mairina Dunn was captured and charged with her murder, police are still looking for four young men in connection to the death of Riki Mafi, 17, who was attacked with a baseball bat in the Otara Town Centre a week ago.

They are but recent names in a never-ending list of horror: Liam Ashley, fatally beaten in a prison van; Haruru Pekepo, shot in Otahuhu; Faafetai Lafolua, dead after being hit and dragged by a car; Pilikitisua Neru, 46, killed after being attacked during a church service; 18-year-old Kelly Lawrence, stabbed to death outside a party in Manurewa; the battered Kahui babies.

Mafi's murder is the sixth homicide inquiry launched by Counties Manukau police in three months. Are we really such a crime-soaked society?

Vicki Allpress, of Mairangi Bay, thinks so. "New Zealand, what has happened to you?" she asked back in July, her question prompted by an earlier run of atrocious crimes including the murder of Lois Dear, 66, a Tokoroa teacher who was attacked in her classroom on a Sunday when preparing for the new term.

"A teacher battered to death ... a Wellington man brutally murdered and dismembered, a fatal shooting on the streets of Otahuhu, a fatal stabbing in Whangarei, and so on and so on. When did we become so violent? Why are we so savage? When did these levels of crime become accepted and expected?"

Hillsborough reader Nitin Palande told the Herald that safety was a factor in her family's decision to emigrate to New Zealand from the United States. "But over the past few months, all we have been hearing about is rapes, murders, assaults and daylight abductions. It seems no different from suburban Los Angeles. We are really wondering if we made the correct decision to come here."

News reports of August 22 and 23 wouldn't have been of help to the conflicted Palande family. In one, a North Shore police commander was reassuring that crime was not out of control following reports of several incidents at a shopping mall: "Glenfield is a safe suburb in the safest city in New Zealand." Next day, a detective senior sergeant recommended that women in Botany and Manukau shop in pairs because of a spate of robberies targeting lone women.

The Palandes might draw solace from bald statistics comparing their new country to their old metropolis. There were 109 homicides in New Zealand last year, 86 the year before and 104 in 2003 far fewer in total than Los Angeles' single best year of 487 homicides, and a fraction of the City of Angels' worst year of 1096 homicides in 1992.

Statistically, neither crime nor serious crime in New Zealand is increasing dramatically (see table). Despite recent high-profile murders, our homicide rate is lower than 37 out of 51 countries listed by the United Nations, and has trended slightly downwards in the past 10 years.

Yet crime is a concern for most people. It was the sixth-biggest issue in a survey conducted by the Herald before the last election.

Why? It may be simply that our perception is our reality. The prominence in the media of serious crime stories may blind us to the broader picture. Relativity gets lost. As an example, dramatic pictures of Ruapehu erupting in 1995 prompted calls from around the world to friends as far away from the Central Plateau as Auckland to check they were okay.

News is what does not ordinarily happen in the community. Hence the old joke of Aussie wit Clive James that people would kill to live in a place such as New Zealand where the theft of a Morris Minor was news. Hyperbole aside, his point is valid. When violence, corruption and disaster are daily occurrences they rapidly cease to be prominently reported.

Crime has always featured in news. You will find such stories in newspapers of 100 years ago. They are there because they reflect concerns the community has. Crime stories also sell perhaps appealing to the same instinct that prompts us to look when passing the scene of a nasty road accident.

There is also a ready supply. The police need the public's help and so feed information through media conferences and, at the other end of the process, information is laid out in court.

"Crime news is news on a plate," says Jim Tully, head of journalism at Canterbury University. Extreme violence, sexual violence and the crimes of the times (cannabis in the 1970s, glue sniffing in the 1980s, Ecstasy last decade, P [pure methamphetamine] today) make the news editor's cut.

"Each and every murder will be printed in this country and will make the bulletin," says Tully. And, due to the country's size and media structure, most of us hear about it.

That is unusual internationally. "Living in Oregon you are not going to hear anything about the crimes in Florida unless it happens to be Versace," says Tully. "Our smallness is a huge factor. We are much more aware of what is going on all around the country because of our smallness geographically and population-wise."

Scale and perspective does get lost. Tully says provincial towns can appear crime-ridden when they are not, simply because an extreme crime is what it takes to justify the cost of dispatching a television crew.

Consequently some people may feel vulnerable when it is not justified, notes Tully. "I think old folk can have a heightened sense of fear because of some of the news reporting they get, particularly around burglaries."

Steve Rutherford's window on the subject comes courtesy of his work. He is a detective inspector who heads the crime investigation bureau covering Counties and Manukau. It's been his beat for much of his 34-year career, and includes suburbs characterised by low incomes and high crime rates.

The pattern he's noticed is that there's more violence and greater violence. "Domestics are becoming more violent. A big percentage of homicides and very serious assaults arise from them," Rutherford says. "The other factor is teenagers or people in their early 20s. The violence they inflict has increased."

As has the incidence, particularly of young offenders, to be armed with "[pieces] of wood, hammers, axes, firearms, knives, baseballs bats".

"I don't want to be seen as making a beat-up of it but the reality is [violence] has escalated and it shouldn't all be gauged on homicides.

"People gauge road statistics on the number who died. Well that's one statistic. What about all the other ones that are maimed and damaged for life?"

Prison figures are the other set of statistics you might expect to shed light on how lawless our society is. We have 180 prisoners for every 100,000 citizens, which puts us second among developed nations behind the US (700 per 100,000). Here's some more figures: We have 100 crimes each year for every 1000 citizens, compared to 90 in England, 24 in Spain and 20 in Ireland.

But as a percentage of crimes committed, we imprison very few people. We have 18 prisoners per 1000 crimes, compared to 13 in England, 33 in Ireland and 48 in Spain.

But, as with crime news, statistics don't necessarily convey an accurate overall picture. For example, we are probably not as bad as our second place in the prisoners-per-100,000 category suggests. "We put [offenders aged under 20] in places we call prison [while] most others put them in places they call reformatories, borstals or youth institutions and so when they count their prison inmates, they don't count them," says Geoff Hall, an Otago University law professor with a special interest in sentencing information systems.

Canada, for example, counted only those in federal jails. "In other words we are comparing apples and oranges." The same problem applies to crime statistics, Police headquarters told the Herald that countries couldn't be readily compared because of different categorisation.

That leaves statistics for recorded crime in New Zealand which does not suggest crime is out of control. Hall, though, views these too with a circumspect eye. "The figures are those recorded by the police and the less people there are available to record the crime, then the stats go down. And, the less public confidence in the police the less crime that's reported because if you don't think your burglary report is going to be answered in a day or two, you don't bother.

"That the crime figures have gone down is probably in fact not a good look for the police at all."

Serious violent crime is more likely to be reported to police and so stats showing an increase in this area are likely to be more accurate.

Hall suspects this rise may reflect a P epidemic. He believes there is evidence of a major problem with the drug here and suspects there may be a reluctance by Government to acknowledge that because doing so may oblige it to pour money into combating it.

Are we awash with violent crime? We may take it from the policeman that, in pockets around the country, the incidence and level of violence has increased. We may take it from the available figures that New Zealand remains a comparatively safe country.

And we will take in the news through the filter of our own experiences and our sense of personal vulnerability.