What are your odds?
The recent release of the latest New Zealand Police Statistics make for some interesting reading. Our Youth Justice stream has been using information from these data sets to expose some interesting trends (see last week’s post on youth drug offence prosecution).
This graphic shows the proportion of youth and child apprehensions leading to prosecution in 2011, broken down by offence type. We don’t know the seriousness or details of each crime recorded, but a picture emerges with some surprises. We might want to ask “please explain.”
- The offence second-most-likely to result in prosecution is “offences against justice procedures, government security and government operations” – a category more likely to lead to prosecution than acts intended to cause injury;
- There are very few homicide or related offences for young offenders – only three cases in 2011;
- Theft is the most common youth offence;
- Of the 3495 theft apprehensions recorded as Caucasian, there were 588 prosecutions. For Māori, of the 5660 apprehensions recorded, 1173 resulted in prosecution (16.8% vs. 20.7%.);
- For every offence category other than “miscellaneous offences”, Māori have higher proportion of apprehensions leading to prosecution.
Of course it is important to approach these statistics with caution. As Thomas Lumley highlights, the numbers can be used and abused. These data are only a partial story, but provide an interesting starting point to start asking questions. When the Government releases its Youth Crime Action Plan later this year, JustSpeak will be looking closely for how it plans to address these sometimes surprising outcomes for young people.