Wellington Sexual Assault Crime Statistics 10-11

Each year the New Zealand Police publishes a set of Fiscal Year 2010-2011 Crime Statistics, and the most recent set were made public on Monday, 3rd October 2011.

There are some interesting things to note in this data, particulary concerning the sexual assault and related offences statistics. Firstly that the number of offences has either been increasing, or reporting rates have increased over the last 3 fiscal years, but it’s hard to know why this trend is occurring without more research…

But I was actually most interested in the apprehension rates and the resolution rates for cases.

Marking a case as resolved means that the offender has ben identified by the police, but not necessarily that action has been taken (for example, an offender may be dead, or out of the country). The resolution rate for sexual assault cases in Wellington for the fiscal yeat 10-11 was 49.3%, so basically a 1 in 2 resolution rate. 

The apprehension rate for these cases is the number of cases where action is taken against the offender, for example; giving them a warning, prosecuting them, whatever. The apprehension rate for cases was slightly lower, at 45.6%. There’s definetly room for improvement there, but I would also be interested in seeing how that stacks up against other regions and even other countries. May do a bit more analysis and report back.

But the really interesting statistic is that in cases where the offender is identified, for 92.5% of those cases the offender is apprehended – which means that the police are doing stuff with the information they gain from survivors and their own subsequent investigations.

I think this is a positive statistic, and hopefully we can improve on it and the other figures next year. It’s important to show to survivors that if they wish to report their assault and identify the offender(s), that this information is treated seriously and used appropriately to apprehend offenders.

One thing I would really like to see in the stats is a break-down of the type of apprehension that was handed down to offenders. It would be interesting to see the numbers on diversion, prosecutions, warning and the other types of apprehension.

The satistics are published on Statistics New Zealand and the Police also publish a separate report with key findings.

http://www.stats.govt.nz/tools_and_services/tools/TableBuilder/recorded-crime-statistics.aspx
http://www.police.govt.nz/sites/default/files/resources/crime-statistics/09_wellington_official_stats_10-11_final.pdf