A woman appeared in court this week after the death of a Northland man at a property near Paihia, as reported by RNZ. Cases like that one end up in a statistic almost nobody looks at: the number of people sitting in prison on remand, charged with homicide and related offences, waiting for a trial.

Here are two numbers from that dataset that shouldn't be able to sit side by side.

In 2024, the figure was 117. That was the lowest count since 2016. Eight years of movement, and the number had drifted back down to where it was during the quietest stretch in the modern record.

In 2025, it was 222. That is the highest figure in the entire 27-year series, going back to 1998. (Source: Stats NZ, remand-prisoners)

One year apart. An extra 105 people. A jump of roughly 90 percent. The previous record was 174 back in 2021, and 2025 blew past it by nearly 50.

Now, the crucial caveat, because this is exactly the kind of number that gets waved around in a press release. Remand is not conviction. These are people charged and held in custody before their case is resolved. A remand count moves for two very different reasons: how many serious cases are entering the system, and how long the system takes to deal with them. If charges stayed flat but cases took twice as long to reach trial, the remand number would climb anyway. The dataset can't tell you which lever moved.

What it can tell you is history, and the history is genuinely strange. New Zealand's homicide remand count spent the 2000s bouncing between roughly 120 and 162. Then came the quiet years. In 2012 it fell to 96. By 2015 and 2016 it sat at just 81, the lowest sustained level since the late 1990s. That was a real thing that happened, and it happened while plenty of people insisted the country was falling apart.

Then it climbed. 126 in 2017. 144 in 2018 and again in 2019. 162 in 2020, 174 in 2021. Then a dip: 132, 138, and 117 across 2022 to 2024. And now 222.

The 27-year average is about 138. The 2025 figure is roughly 60 percent above it, and almost triple where things stood a decade ago.

What this data does not support is the comfortable story that everything has been getting steadily worse forever. It hasn't. The trend has reversed direction at least four times since 1998, and the 1998 count itself, at 75, remains the lowest in the record by a wide margin. Anyone who tells you the line only goes one way is selling something.

What it also doesn't support is a shrug. A single-year leap of this size is not noise in a series that has never moved this violently before. Either substantially more people are being charged with the most serious offences on the books, or the courts are holding them far longer before resolving anything. Both would be worth knowing. Neither is in this table.

The number is real. The explanation is the part somebody needs to go and find.