34 seconds. That’s all it took. 34 seconds.

That’s all it took victims advocate Ruth Money to sum up beautifully the shambles we seem to be in when it comes to crime in New Zealand.

It’s a 34 second summary that I hope every politician gets to hear at some point today - if they haven’t heard it already - because it just shows what a cock-up they’ve made and continue to make when it comes to crime. Labour, National, ACT, the Greens, the Maori Party. The whole lot of them.

If there’s one word to describe Ruth Money’s view of things, it would be “woeful”. And she was making the comments after new stats out today show that under the current government - between 2017 and 2022 - the total number of people charged and convicted for all types of criminal offences dropped by about a quarter.

But under National (between 2008 and 2017), the number of people charged fell by 40 percent and the number of convictions fell by 36 percent.

And if you want to go back to a time when charges and convictions actually increased, you’d have to go back to Helen Clark’s days in the 2000s, when there was a dramatic increase in police prosecutions which was the starting point of an exploding prison population.

Overall, the number of people charged with a crime in New Zealand now is about a third of what it was back in 1981. Back then there were 3 million people in New Zealand, now there are 5 million.

So the overarching message coming out of all of this, is that it’s much easier to get away with crime than it used to be. But it’s not something that has just happened while Labour has been in power. It’s been a slow burner for the past 20 years.

Which means that pretty much every politician in this country can’t claim innocence when it comes to who’s to blame for crime appearing to go through the roof.

Ruth Money says, because there are different classifications for the same kinds of offences, crime statistics don’t show cautions versus charges, they don’t show when someone has been charged with just a lead offence and not charged for every offence.

She says the recording practises keep changing and the data can be manipulated in so many different ways that the results are different every time you look. A complete shambles.

And here's how she summed it up on a 34-second statement: "Our response to crime in New Zealand is woeful. It's woeful for the person who has done the offending because they need

rehabilitation, they need safety from themselves, and they need proper reintegration or they're on a revolving door. And in my line of work, the victims don;t get the support that they need. There's little to no funding, little to no mental health support, and they might be waiting four-plus years for a justice system that is completely clogged-up and is slow to respond."

That’s it there. A complete summary of how the whole system is stuffed.

When I heard Ruth Money saying that this morning, a lightbulb went off in my head.

For starters, I thought about the victims of crime. As well as those who might not have been affected personally by crime, but are terrified that they will be.

People like dairy owners, service station workers, people living on their own, women who don’t feel safe on the streets at night. I thought about all of them, and I started to despise all the politicians trying to make political gain from their trauma, fears and anxieties.

And I despised these politicians further - politicians of all colours - for their lack of vision and unwillingness to work together to do something meaningful about making us all feel safer and less likely to be affected by crime.

Because it’s very clear to me what needs to happen here. As Ruth Money says, there is a complete lack of consistency when it comes to recording crime, charging people for crimes and punishing people for criminal offences. No consistency.

And this is what I think the politicians need to focus on. They need to make it their priority. But, most importantly, they need to do it together.

If Labour and National were able to agree on a housing policy, for example. (although that one’s on the rocks a bit at the moment), why can’t they do it for crime?

They are totally capable of it. And, if we are really going to do something meaningful about rising crime, we need to have a shared long-term plan. Not one that gets chucked out at the next election. Not one that is all knee-jerk in an election year.

I’m talking about a shared vision and a shared plan that makes it very clear what we will arrest and charge people for; what punishments they will get; and what support victims of crime will be guaranteed to get.

That way, the cops will know what they’re expected to do when they catch offenders. The judges will know what they’re expected to do when it comes to sentencing. And victims of crime will know that they won’t be left lingering on their own while the system grinds almost at a complete standstill.

That, in my opinion, is the only way we are going to make people feel safer.

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