Court stories dominated the crime news this week. A man jailed four years and two months for strangling his partner in her home. A religious group leader and his wife sentenced over the manslaughter and kidnapping of a 70-year-old man at Gulf Harbour, both reported by RNZ. A pedestrian killed in an Auckland supermarket carpark.

Individual cases are horrifying. Individual cases are also a terrible way to understand what courts are actually doing. So here is the volume figure for one region, the Bay of Plenty Justice Service Area, across all offence types and all adult ages: 3,282 convictions in 2025. That is the lowest number in 41 years. You have to go back to 1984 to find anything comparable. (Source: Ministry of Justice, adults-convicted-by-sentence)

Look at the run of the series and the scale of the change is hard to miss. The peak was 6,992 in 2009. The 2025 count is 53% below that. Not a wobble, not a one-year dip: a halving over sixteen years. The trend has been downward in thirteen of the last sixteen years, with increases in only 2016, 2017 and 2023.

The steepest stretch came first. Between 2010 and 2015, Bay of Plenty adult convictions fell from 6,681 to 3,808, a drop of 43% in five years. Then came a small rebound to 4,302 in 2017, and after that a slow grind down: 3,816 in 2019, 3,576 in 2020, 3,355 in 2022, 3,347 in 2024, and now 3,282.

Here is the detail I find most striking. Every single year from 1986 through 2019, including the relatively quiet mid-1990s when the count sat around 4,400, produced more adult convictions in this region than 2025 did. The late 1980s, often remembered as calmer, ran at 4,478 in 1988 and 4,538 in 1989. Both are roughly a third higher than today's figure.

Now the honest counter-argument, because it matters. Convictions are not crime. This series measures adults sentenced in court, so it moves with police charging decisions, prosecution thresholds, alternative resolutions and diversion, not just with offending. A fall in convictions is consistent with less offending, but it is equally consistent with fewer charges being laid for the same behaviour. It is also a raw count, not a rate per head of population. And if the 2025 figure is still being finalised, the low could shrink slightly when the year is complete.

Those caveats cut both ways though. If you want to argue the courts are drowning in a rising tide of offending, this dataset does not support it for the Bay of Plenty. The workload is close to half what it was in 2009.

My view: the gap between how crime feels and what the sentencing data shows is now wide enough to be a problem in itself. Serious violence still happens, gets reported, and should be. But a region processing 3,282 adult convictions is not the same region that processed 6,992, and policy built on the vibe rather than the count will be built wrong.