Am I on another planet?

Yesterday I looked at conviction statistics and showed that violence has increased. Today I have sourced apprehension statistics to show the same. (Unfortunately these only go back to 1999.)


I then converted the apprehension numbers into rates per 1,000 of population and charted them against the unemployment rate.


One has been going up and one has been going down (until recently).

Revisiting what was posited yesterday in the New Zealand Herald about murder and violent crime;

Victoria University Institute of Criminology director Michael Rowe said the decline coincided with similar falls in violent crime in Australia, the United States and Britain since the early 1990s.

Unemployment has dropped since then in all three countries, until recently, as have the numbers in the most violence-prone group - males aged 15 to 29, who declined from 12.3 per cent of New Zealand's population in 1991 to 10 per cent in 2006.

Now there's a thing. We have more violent apprehensions per 1,000 while the most violence-prone age group is shrinking - relatively. Thank God we have an ageing population or that pink line would be even steeper.