Radio Interview: New Zealand's retail crime statistics overblown
- Team Optic
- Mar 2
- 3 min read
Group Brand Strategy & Innovation Director Nicholas Dynon was interviewed last week on RNZ Nights with Emile Donovan on the hot topic of New Zealand's retail crime figures.
Retail crime - ram raids, smash 'n' grabs, and plain old theft - has been big news in New Zealand in recent years, with a post-COVID hike in retail crime reaching a peak in late 2024. The apparent crime wave has led to a range of reactive policing measures and legislative changes as well as moves by retailers to invest in new security technologies.
“Media reports and virtue signalling by political leaders point to NZ's post-COVID crime wave as being 'unprecedented', part of a 'new normal',” said Nick. “But it's not.”
According to Nick, the retail crime surge that peaked in 2023-24 has more to do with economic cycles than it does with any post-COVID societal shifts.
“A weighty body of academic research tells us that retail crime - or property crime more broadly - is associated with periods of high inflation,” he said, citing international research he referred to in his article recently published by Newsroom NZ.
“We saw it in NZ with historically high inflation in 2023-24... and we saw the pattern with the 1991 recession and 2008 GFC. When there's a cost-of-living crisis, organised crime groups respond by stealing more items and selling them more cheaply than folk might pay for them over the counter.”
“While the imperative of addressing chronic under-reporting of retail crime is a good thing, the problem is that it's skewed the stats.”
But inflation alone is not solely responsible for the dramatic spike in NZ's retail crime stats, he explains. The extent of the spike, he points out, has been fuelled by big changes in how retail security incidents are being reported.
“In short, the numbers have likely been substantially inflated by (i) calls by Retail NZ for retailers to report more crime and sub-crime incidents along with (ii) the rapid adoption of crime intelligence platform technologies, such as Auror, that make it easier for stores to report,” he said.
According to Nick, it's been a perfect - and unnatural – storm. The thousands of new incidents now being reported are appearing in both official and non-official metrics, whereas they weren't previously. These events that would have gone unreported in the past are likely to account for the majority of the increase in the retail crime stats.
“While the imperative of addressing chronic under-reporting of retail crime is a good thing, the problem is that it's skewed the stats,” said Nick.
“Government and retailers alike have responded to the 'crime wave' with reactive legislation and investments in increasingly intrusive security technologies... such as the use of live facial recognition in supermarkets. Significant amounts of money - including taxpayers' - is being spent on the basis of misleading data.”
He suggests that retail 'security incident' and 'crime' data and the statistics that are drawn from the data should be made more transparent by the organisations that publish them - in terms of reporting and surveying methodologies, data selection, and potential conflicts of interest.
"Yes, we've likely experienced a rise in retail crime, but the extent of it has been misrepresented by the statistics, and the curve is now trending down... why?... inflation's been falling.”
