What happens when police lay a charge, build a case, and then just… walk away?

Last year, police withdrew 378,165 charges in New Zealand. That's not charges dismissed by a judge. Not cases where someone was found not guilty. These are charges the police themselves decided to drop. (Source: Stats NZ, charges-by-offence-type)

To understand how extraordinary that number is, you need to look backwards. In 2020, police withdrew 311,781 charges. By 2024, that figure had climbed to 378,165. That's an increase of more than 66,000 withdrawn charges in four years. A 21% jump.

You have to go back to 2010 to find a year when police dropped more charges than they did in 2024. This isn't a blip. This is a trend.

The question isn't just about volume. It's about what withdrawal means. When police withdraw a charge, it could mean several things: new evidence emerged that undermined the case, the victim didn't want to proceed, the charge was laid incorrectly, or prosecution wasn't deemed to be in the public interest. But with nearly 380,000 withdrawals in a single year, you're looking at more than 1,000 charges dropped every single day.

Think about what that represents in police time. Each of those charges required an officer to investigate, gather evidence, interview witnesses, and complete paperwork. Each one went through an initial review. Many would have involved legal consultations. And then, at some point in the process, someone decided: no, we're not going ahead with this.

The trajectory since 2020 tells its own story. There was a dip in 2021, when withdrawals fell to 274,665. That year, during COVID lockdowns, overall police activity dropped. But since then, the numbers have climbed steadily: 301,815 in 2022, 340,197 in 2023, and now 378,165 in 2024.

What changed? Are police laying charges more readily, knowing they can withdraw them later? Are victims becoming less willing to see cases through? Are courts so backlogged that cases collapse before they reach trial? The data doesn't answer these questions. But it does tell you that something fundamental shifted in how New Zealand prosecutes crime.

This matters because withdrawn charges sit in a strange legal limbo. They're not convictions, so they don't show up in sentencing data. They're not acquittals, so defendants can't claim vindication. They're just… dropped. And when you're dropping more than a thousand charges every day, you're talking about a justice system that's laying more groundwork than it can build on.

The next time someone tells you crime statistics prove X or Y, ask them about this number. Because 378,165 withdrawn charges is the part of the system nobody wants to talk about: the cases that started but never finished, the charges that went nowhere, the investigations that ended in silence.