Everyone's talking about rising crime. Politicians are promising tougher sentences. The public is worried about safety. But here's what the data quietly shows: courts in the Bay of Plenty convicted 233,068 adults in 2024, the lowest number in nearly four decades. (Source: Ministry of Justice, adults-convicted-by-sentence)

You have to go back to 1987 to find a comparable figure. That's before the internet, before mobile phones, when New Zealand's population was 3.3 million instead of today's 5.3 million. The Bay of Plenty itself has grown massively in that time. Yet courts are convicting fewer adults now than they were then.

The recent trajectory tells the story. In 2020, there were 246,728 convictions. By 2024, that number had fallen to 233,068. That's a drop of more than 13,000 convictions in four years, even as the region's population continued to climb.

This isn't about crime going unpunished. It's about fewer cases making it to conviction. That could mean several things: fewer offences being committed, police prioritising differently, cases being resolved before trial, or courts diverting people away from the criminal justice system altogether. The data doesn't tell us which. It just tells us the outcome.

What it definitely tells us is that the narrative about spiralling crime doesn't match what's happening in the courts. While public anxiety about safety remains high, the number of people actually being convicted has been falling steadily. In 2021, convictions dropped to 244,408. By 2022, they were down to 233,324. They ticked up slightly in 2023 to 241,384, then fell again in 2024.

The Bay of Plenty has one of New Zealand's fastest-growing populations. Tauranga alone has added tens of thousands of residents in the past decade. More people usually means more crime, or at least more interactions with the justice system. But that's not what the conviction data shows.

This matters because policy gets made on perception, not data. If politicians and voters believe crime is surging, they'll demand harsher penalties and more police funding. If the data shows convictions at a 37-year low, that demands a different conversation. Maybe the justice system is working better than we think. Maybe diversion programmes are keeping people out of court. Maybe crime really is falling in some categories, even if it doesn't feel that way.

The gap between what the data shows and what the headlines suggest keeps getting wider. In the Bay of Plenty, at least, courts are convicting fewer adults than they have in a generation. That's not the story anyone's telling. But it's the story in the numbers.