Crime Rate in NZ (don’t worry it’s safe)
I downloaded the New Zealand Herald app a few weeks ago and besides various reports on daily business in New Zealand I got a whole lot of notifications concerning crimes or deaths in New Zealand. As a matter of fact I was shocked by the sheer number of those reports. I continually started to feel like there was a lot of crime and a lot of people dying in accidents or something in New Zealand. So I thought I should conduct some research, check crime rates, media reports, surveys concerning the feeling of security amongst Kiwis and compare those to German rates in order to have some number to relate my findings to.
Wikipedia indicates that the relative crime rate in New Zealand is 777 crimes per 10.000 people in 2014 . Crime rate in New Zealand has been decreasing in the past 20 years with minor increase between 2006 and 2009 but is nowadays at the lowest statistically measured level. Also the number of cases solved has strongly increased at least until 2007 where it was at 50%. Those facts can also be seen on the governmental statistics page with very detailed tables.
In the minds of the Kiwis, many of them (61%), at least according to a 2014 Ministry of Justice survey, think that national crime is increasing on a national level while only 20% of the people feel that local crime is increasing. As a matter of fact, the collective perception of crimes seems to differ strongly from reality. Furthermore, most of the Kiwis receive their information about crime from TV, newspapers or online news while 8 out of 10 of them believe that these are reliable.
As for Germany, the crime rate was at 753 crimes per 10.000 people in 2014 which is slightly below the NZ rate. As a matter of fact the clearance rate in Germany is also slightly higher (54,9%). Nevertheless, as a German citizen and a politically interested person I feel like a lot of people in Germany do also not feel safe and believe that crime is increasing which it does not according to statistics.
Tl;DR: Germany and New Zealand are almost at the same level of security and have a similar crime rate as well as a similar clearance rate. Although in both countries the crime rate has decreased while the clearance rate has increased in the past, people don’t really feel safer nowadays. That’s probably something that has to do with the fast and globally connected media (just google it if you’re interested).
