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Crime & Justice

Courts Worry About AI Fakes While Youth Defying Authority Hits 32-Year Low

As judges grapple with deepfakes in courtrooms, the data shows a different story: young people challenging government authority has collapsed to levels not seen since 1992. The contrast is stark.

19 February 2026 Ministry of Justice AI-generated from open data
📰 This story connects government data to current events reported by RNZ, RNZ, RNZ.

Key Figures

108
2024 youth offences against government
The lowest figure in 32 years of data, showing youth defiance of authority has collapsed to historic lows.
453 offences
Peak year (2020)
Four years ago these offences were more than four times higher, before dropping 76% to current levels.
76%
Drop since 2020
In just four years, youth crimes against justice procedures and government operations fell by three quarters.
300 offences
2019 baseline
Even before the 2020 spike, these offences were nearly three times higher than today's figure.

While New Zealand's courts are grappling with AI-generated evidence and deepfakes, here's what's actually happening in youth courts: young people are defying authority less than at any point in the past three decades.

Offences against justice procedures and government operations by youth dropped to 108 cases in 2024. That's the lowest figure since this data started being collected in 1992. (Source: Ministry of Justice, youth-court-orders)

The timing matters. Courts are scrambling to deal with sophisticated technology that can fake reality itself. But the behaviour that brings young people into those courts for disobeying authority, breaching court orders, or resisting government processes? It's vanishing.

Four years ago, in 2020, there were 453 of these offences. That's the peak. Since then, it's fallen 76%. Not gradually: it collapsed. From 453 to 198 in a single year. Then it kept falling.

This isn't about crime generally. This specific category covers the exact behaviours politicians talk about when they say young people don't respect authority anymore: breaching bail conditions, failing to comply with court orders, obstructing justice, resisting police. The courts see these cases every week. Just far, far fewer of them than they used to.

Compare that 2020 peak to where we are now. In four years, youth defiance of legal authority dropped by more than three quarters. The 2024 figure of 108 is lower than any year in the 1990s, lower than the 2000s, lower than the entire 2010s.

Yet the conversation hasn't shifted. The Ministry of Justice is considering mobile courthouses to improve access. Courts are worried about technology undermining evidence. But nobody's asking why the pipeline of young people challenging government authority has dried up so dramatically.

There's no policy announcement to point to. No obvious intervention in 2020 that explains the cliff. What changed was the world: COVID lockdowns, remote learning, a generation that grew up watching institutions struggle.

Maybe young people learned different ways to resist that don't show up in court data. Maybe they stopped resisting at all. Maybe the system stopped catching them, or stopped charging them. The data can't tell us why. It can only tell us what: defiance of government authority by youth is at a 32-year low, and we're having the opposite conversation.

Courts are right to worry about AI fabricating evidence. That's a real threat to justice. But while we focus on fake crimes, real youth crime against authority is disappearing from the docket. Both things can be true. The data just shows which one's actually happening in courtrooms right now.

Related News

Data source: Ministry of Justice — View the raw data ↗
This story was generated by AI from publicly available government data. Verify figures from the original source before citing.
youth-crime justice-system government-authority court-data