KEY POINTS:
Serious crime such as violence, street robbery and sexual attacks is on the rise - but the true picture of offending has been muddied by two sets of statistics released by police yesterday.
Police said total crime rose 4.1 per cent between 2005 and 2006, with 424,134 reported offences over the 12 months to last December.
But national headquarters said the real crime rate had barely moved and the data was skewed by a change in police intelligence systems.
The 2006 figures were released but police said they did not paint a true picture of year-on-year crime trends because they were a mixture of data from the old Wanganui Computer System and the new National Intelligence Application introduced in June 2005.
To compensate, police released figures covering six-month periods in 2005 and 2006 - when the new system was in place - showing overall crime was down by 0.04 per cent.
Police Minister Annette King said she hoped crime was down "but I prefer to wait for a full year direct comparison of statistics before commenting more on that".
Police statistician Gavin Knight said the new system recorded more crime and provided greater detail about an incident.
The days of individual police officers recording crime data had passed, with trained data entry specialists now carrying out the work.
"Just put it down to having good training, we tended to pick up and record better than we were before," Mr Knight said.
The two sets of statistics painted different pictures in some areas of offending, such as showing dishonesty crimes were down 2.4 per cent in the six months but up 2.8 per cent across 2006. Burglary rose 3 per cent under the six-month comparison, but 6.1 per cent in the calendar year statistics.
Both sets of figures showed a leap in sex offending and violence.
Sexual offences were up 9.7 per cent in the last six months of 2006 to 1610 offences, including 1140 sexual attacks, or a 14.8 per cent increase.
Grievous assaults rose more than 5 per cent to 2176 offences and robbery jumped more than 20 per cent to 1328 crimes in the last six months of 2006.
Assistant Commissioner Grant Nicholls said most robberies occurred in public places and many were related to youth offending.
The rise in robberies had been driven by offending in Waikato, Waitemata (North Shore, West Auckland and Rodney), Auckland City, Counties Manukau and Wellington, he said.
"I've called for reports from Auckland City and Waikato and I'm satisfied they're taking affirmative action."
Police districts were instructed by police national headquarters to present their crime figures based on the six monthly figures.
They showed Northland police cut crime by 8 per cent in the last six months of 2006, compared with the same period in 2005, although crime was 1.9 per cent down in the calendar year statistics.
Similarly, crime in Counties Manukau was down 2.4 per cent under the July-December figures, but up 10.5 per cent in the full 2006 figures.
Crime in Auckland City was up 1.3 per cent across 2006 and down 2.6 per cent in the final six months, compared to the same period in 2005.
National Party justice spokesman Simon Power said he was sticking to the calendar year figures, showing violence overall was up 5 per cent, rather than the alternative 1.8 per cent statistic under the July-December months.
He said violent crime had gone up 22 per cent - from 41,573 to 50,731 offences - since 2000. "It's just far too convenient for the Government to say there's been a shift in system."
