In today's headlines with Wilhelmina Shrimpton, fears meth lollies could be fatal, calls for accountability from the Reserve Bank and budget blowout at Ministry of Disabled People
A retailer community group is going to the Ombudsman after a police refusal to release figures on the number of arrests it has made of offenders who have committed retail crime.
Internal police data has revealed that retail crime is continuing to surge under the National-led Government, with a 17% increase in the first five months of 2024 compared to the same period last year.
The Dairy and Business Owners’ Group, which released the data it sourced from policedata.nz, then made an OIA request asking how many arrests were made after the spike of 8207 more thefts such as shoplifting, 66 more cases of assault and 17 more cases of sexual assault and related offences over the period in question.
“Disappointingly police gave our team nothing despite answering exactly the same question on 8 March 2024,” said Manish Thakkar, chair of the group.
“Police are declining to give us result codes for retail crime scenes,” Thakkar said.
“Information they had previously given us goes back to 2015. We have gone to the Ombudsman as we want to know if arrests have increased as retail crime continues to spike.”
A police spokeswoman said that upon review, police recognised that the data previously provided to the group via the “K9 result codes” was “not robust and should not have been provided”.
“Therefore, the second response did not provide data. However, we recognise police could have looked into other options to provide relevant data, and we are working on this now,” the spokeswoman said.
Over the five months, shoplifting and theft spiked to 49,505 cases, up from 41,298 last year, and 1670 assault cases were attended by police, an increase from 1604.
There was also a total of 106 sexual assaults, up from 89, according to the data.
The data paints a unflattering picture of the Government’s key policy pledge to crack down on retail crime with the introduction of new police initiatives to curb violence and anti-social behaviour.
Thakkar said the 5% fall in robberies meant there was still an average of 2.5 robberies happening each day, and police were still handling 18 burglaries daily even with the 10% fall in incidences of unlawful entry.
He said it was bad news that assaults were up 4%, equally to 11 a day, and worryingly, sexual offences had risen 19%.
“Police is happy to work with the Dairy and Business Owners’ Group to provide them with more in-depth data on retail crime where we are able, and we have reached out to Mr Thakkar to provide the retailer community with more suitable data,” the police spokeswoman added.
