New Zealand’s murder rate appears to have almost halved in the past 20 years despite an overwhelming public belief that crime has got worse.
Police statistics show that for 44 years until about 1970 the murder rate fluctuated around an average of six a year for every million people.
The rate leapt to an average of 21 murders per million people annually from 1985 to 1992, but has dropped steadily ever since.
Last year’s rate was 12.1 murders per million people.
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.
The murder rate is regarded as one of the best measures of trends in actual violent crime, because it is least likely to be affected by changing police policies or public attitudes which are believed to have affected recent family violence statistics.
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