Everyone's talking about crime being out of control. Politicians are campaigning on it. Newspapers lead with it. But here's the number they're not telling you: Bay of Plenty courts convicted 233,068 people in 2024. That's the lowest figure since 1987.

To put that in context, you have to go back 37 years to find a year when fewer people walked out of Bay of Plenty courtrooms with convictions. (Source: Ministry of Justice, adults-convicted-by-sentence)

The trajectory is striking. In 2020, the region recorded 246,728 convictions. Four years later, that number has dropped by 13,660. That's a 5.5% decline while the region's population was growing.

This isn't a one-year blip. The numbers have been trending down with some volatility: 244,408 in 2021, then a sharper drop to 233,324 in 2022. There was a slight uptick to 241,384 in 2023, but 2024 brought the count back down to what is now a nearly four-decade low.

What makes this particularly striking is the disconnect between these numbers and the public conversation. When crime dominates political debate, you'd expect conviction rates to be climbing. Instead, they're falling to levels not seen since the late 1980s.

Convictions don't tell the whole story about crime, of course. They reflect what's reaching courts and resulting in guilty verdicts. Changes in police priorities, court backlogs, diversion programmes, and charging decisions all play a role. But if the Bay of Plenty were genuinely experiencing an unprecedented crime wave, you'd expect to see it somewhere in a dataset spanning nearly four decades.

The numbers suggest something more complicated than the simple narrative. Either crime itself is falling, or the justice system is processing cases differently, or both. What's clear is that whatever is happening on the streets of Tauranga, Rotorua, and Whakatāne, it's not translating into record numbers of people being convicted.

37 years is a long time. When conviction numbers were last this low, Bob Hawke was Australian Prime Minister, the stock market had just crashed, and the Fourth Labour Government was in its second term. The Bay of Plenty has changed dramatically since then. Its population has grown, its economy has shifted, its demographics have evolved.

But the number of people its justice system is convicting? That's back where it started.