David Haigh
Abstract
The 2023 elections in Aotearoa New Zealand raised crime as a major political issue. This was in spite of a general fall in crime statistics.
Despite major population growth, levels of crime have fallen over past decades, Politicians focused on crimes that were shown on television such as ram-raiding and violent retail robbery. While the focus was on these crimes, other more serious crimes were ignored e.g. domestic violence, fraud and scams, and shoplifting.
This paper raised the need for an agreed way of measuring crime rates and the need to focus on serious
crimes rather than visually confronting images of crime on TV news.
