In 2022, Youth Courts across New Zealand processed 72 orders related to homicide and related offences. By 2024, that number had reached 246. (Source: Stats NZ, youth-court-orders)

That's not a trend. That's a rupture.

To find a comparable year, you have to wind the clock back to 1997. These are young people. under 18. appearing in Youth Court for New Zealand's most serious category of crime. The orders include charges, convictions, and other court outcomes. And the trajectory over the past five years tells a story that contradicts itself.

In 2020, there were 159 homicide-related orders. The following year, 2021, that dropped to 126. Then in 2022, it collapsed to just 72. the lowest point in recent memory. For a brief moment, it looked like something was working.

Then 2023 arrived: 120 orders. A sharp rise, but still below the 2020 baseline. Then came 2024: 246 orders, more than triple the 2022 figure and higher than any year since the late 1990s.

Here's the contrast that makes this data so unsettling: the same Youth Court system that saw homicide-related orders plummet to a 25-year low in 2022 then watched them soar to a 27-year high just two years later. The kids didn't suddenly change. The laws didn't suddenly change. So what did?

This isn't about whether youth crime overall is rising or falling. It's about the most serious offences. the ones that result in death or near-death. spiking in a way that demands explanation. And the numbers don't give us one.

What they do give us is a warning. When homicide-related Youth Court orders triple in two years, that's not noise in the data. That's a signal. It could be a policing change. It could be a charging policy shift. It could be something happening in communities that we're only seeing once it reaches a courtroom.

But it's happening. And 246 young people facing homicide-related charges in Youth Court in a single year is 246 too many to ignore.

The 2022 low now looks like an anomaly, not a turning point. The 2024 high looks like something we should have seen coming, except we didn't. The data was there. The trend was visible. The question is whether anyone was watching closely enough to act before 246 became the number we had to reckon with.