The Front Page: Do our politicians have the right answers for tackling youth crime?

Ōtara’s East Tāmaki Super Market in Auckland has been one of many targets of ram raids in recent months. Photo / Hayden Woodward

From ram raids to robberies, over the last two years, we’ve seen an endless stream of stories about youth crime.

However, official figures show that the spike in young offending has come after a steady drop since 2007.

NZ Herald senior writer Derek Cheng crunched the data recently, and told The Front Page podcast that the numbers have steadily dropped when it comes to recorded youth crime and those who were charged.

“About 5,000 youths were charged in court in 2007, and that dropped to just below 1500 in 2022, but that also included almost 500 17-year-olds who are only brought into the Youth Court jurisdiction in July 2019 - so if we take those out and we’re just looking at 10 to 16-year-olds, it’s gone from 5000 to less than 1000,” Cheng said.

“And if we look at the number of charges, that has also dropped massively from almost 11,000 charges in 2013 to just over 6000 in 2022.”

In a sharp reversal from 2021, 2022 saw a 6 percent increase in the number of young people charged, and a 14 per cent increase in the number of charges.

That’s led to youth crime being a key talking point ahead of October’s election, with policies from Labour, National and Act looking to increase punitive measures against young offenders.

Cheng said a lot of the evidence shows that intervention is the best measure for tackling crime, but surveys show that the public prefers tougher measures such as imprisonment.

“The political divide is what you do with people who you think can be rehabilitated.

“Because the long-term benefit of that, if you get someone off that reoffending cycle, is much, much better than throwing someone behind bars, for them to just come out and then offend and go back behind bars again, that’s going to be more costly to the state.

“It’s going to be more challenging, it’s going to create more crime over the longer term and more victims, and everybody loses.”

So what do the experts say is the best way to approach young offenders? And why were the stats falling for so many years?

Listen to the full episode of The Front Page podcast to hear more about the realities of youth crime in New Zealand.

The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am.

You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.