What’s behind New Zealand’s Retail Crime Wave

For three decades our crime rates have fallen, but retail theft has ramped up in the past five years, and ram raids have shot up in the past 12 months. Is truant kids or woke policing to blame? Neither, writes Nicholas Dynon, it’s the economy, stupid!

Nicholas Dynon is Chief Editor of Line of Defence Magazine and a widely published commentator on New Zealand’s defence and security affairs. Crime in New Zealand is falling, and it’s been falling since the 1990s. We are living in a society that has been experiencing less and less crime. Youth crime in particular has taken a massive dive.

According to the Ministry of Justice’s Youth Justice Indicators Summary Report – December 2021, for example, offending rates among youth have dropped by 63 percent over the past decade.

But this is probably not what your news feed is telling you.

On the contrary, the media is awash with news of an apparent crime wave. Almost daily we’re confronted with news images of the mangled facades of retail outlets across the country ram raided for jewellery, cigarettes, and sportswear.

What do the statistics tell us? According to Radio NZ, there has been a 400 percent increase in ram raids in five years, and between 2020 and 2021 they more than doubled from 191 to 436 with 76 percent of those caught under the age of 18. Of 129 ram raids since May this year, “almost all of them”, according to Police Minister Chris Hipkins, were committed by people under 18.

While the jump in ram raids is clearly extreme, what are the statistics telling us in relation to other property crimes? Analysing New Zealand crime data in the SecIntel risk intelligence platform shows us that nationally in the 12 months to 01 June 2022: • Theft from a Retail Premises: monthly count for May 2022 was 5,092, up from 4,088 for May 2021. Temporary dips due to

COVID lockdowns aside, these crimes have steadily increased over the past five years to over double what they were (2,000 -2,500 per month) throughout 2018.

• Unlawful Entry with Intent / Burglary / Break and Enter: monthly count for May 2022 was 5,619, up from 4,951 for

May 2021. The initial COVID lockdowns in mid-2020 significantly reduced these crimes from a peak of 6,802 in January 2020, and it is only since October 2021 that they have returned to levels similar to those throughout 2017 to 2019.

• Aggravated Robbery: monthly count for May 2022 was 231, which closely resembles the count of 232 for May 2021. Temporary dips due to COVID lockdowns aside, these crimes have hovered either side of the 200 per month mark since 2018.

In aggregate, the incidence of these crimes has increased in the 12 months to 31 May 2022. Having said this, out of the above three, it’s only

Theft from a Retail Premises that has shown significant growth over the past five years. Of course, it’s been a strange old five years, with COVID lockdowns causing statistically outlying retail crime troughs in mid2020 and late-2021.

It’s the economy, stupid! The above line was made famous by Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign strategist James Carville. It was a campaign that took full advantage of economic recession in the US to unseat George Bush and relegate him to one-term president status.

New Zealand of 2022 is thankfully not in recession, and our 3.3 percent unemployment rate isn’t at all shabby, but we are in the midst of what many commentators are referring to as a cost of living crisis.

Statistics NZ’s second quarter CPI revealed in July that annual inflation was at 7.3 percent – the highest inflation rate in three decades. Stats NZ announced last month that annual food prices increased by 5.9 percent from January 2021 to January 2022 – the highest amount in over a decade.

A recent report by Australia’s ABC News noted that in New Zealand supermarkets, “butter is pushing $10 a tub and milk is more than $8 for three litres: this in a country where there are more dairy cows than people.”

Historically, and as Scott LaFranchie eloquently noted in a recent issue of Line of Defence Magazine, there is strong correlation between economic stressors and the incidence of economic crime, and the king of these is inflation. Several pieces of international research have established a pattern of statistical increases in crime during historical periods of rising inflation.

One of the many examples of these is a study published in 2007 by the journal Global Crime, which examined the relationship between crime and inflation and unemployment in the United States from 1960 to 2005. According to the authors: “Crime rates rise as the inflation rate rises. Because of the lag between price and wage adjustments, inflation lowers the real income of low-skilled labour, but rewards property criminals due to the rising demand and subsequent high profits in the illegal market.”

Basically, as rising inflation erodes consumers’ purchasing power, this causes them to ‘trade down’, or buy cheaper. Those who are already buying the cheapest goods are inevitably faced with the prospect of having to turn – knowingly or unknowingly – to markets in stolen goods, and this increased demand in the shadow economy incentivises criminals to create supply.

In New Zealand, along with historically low inflation since the mid-1990s, our crime rates have generally kept to a downward trend, but it’s no surprise that we’re now seeing rising property crimes amid historically high levels of inflation.