Imagine standing in front of a judge. You've been convicted. You're sentenced to community work or supervision. But when the system records your case, it doesn't write down what you actually did wrong. Just: 'Inadequate data available.'

That happened 5,610 times in 2024. (Source: Stats NZ, community-sentences)

To put that in perspective: in 2019, it happened 90 times. By 2022, it had jumped to 1,977. Now it's nearly triple that. In a single year, New Zealand's justice system handed out community sentences for thousands of crimes it apparently couldn't be bothered to properly categorise.

This isn't a rounding error. It's not a technical glitch. It's a data black hole the size of a small town, and it's growing exponentially.

Community sentences are meant to be an alternative to prison. They're cheaper, they keep people connected to their families and jobs, and they're supposed to reduce reoffending. But if we don't know what crimes people are being sentenced for, we can't track whether they work. We can't see patterns. We can't tell if violent offenders are being managed differently to white-collar criminals. We're flying blind.

The trajectory is the alarming part. In 2018, there were 309 cases with inadequate data. That was already too many, but at least it was containable. Then something changed. The numbers stayed low through the early pandemic, but by 2022 they'd exploded. Now, in 2024, we're at 5,610 cases, the highest level in 25 years.

This matters because crime data is political ammunition. Politicians cite falling burglary rates or rising youth offending depending on what suits their narrative. But when thousands of cases vanish into an 'inadequate data' category, we lose the ability to fact-check those claims. We lose transparency. We lose accountability.

And here's what makes it worse: community sentences are meant to be the success story of modern justice. They're the humane alternative, the evidence-based approach. But if we can't even record what crimes they're being used for, how evidence-based can they really be?

Someone, somewhere in the justice system, is making a choice. A choice not to fill in a field. A choice not to categorise properly. A choice that's been made 5,610 times in the last year alone. And nobody's standing up to explain why.