Stand outside an Auckland courthouse on an average week in 2025 and about 94 adults will be convicted of something inside. That's the arithmetic of 4,880 convictions across the Auckland Justice Service Area over a year (Source: Ministry of Justice, adults-convicted-by-sentence). Ninety-four people a week, every week, for every offence type combined.

Now wind the clock back to 1989. The same courts convicted 14,008 adults that year. That's about 269 a week, nearly three times today's rate, in a city with far fewer people in it than Auckland has now.

The long arc is one of the clearest trends in New Zealand justice data, and it almost never gets said out loud. Auckland convictions peaked at 14,008 in 1989, hovered near 9,000 to 10,000 through the mid-1990s, then began a grind downward that lasted two decades. The count broke below 8,000 in 2010, below 6,000 in 2015, and hit 4,630 by 2019. Then COVID arrived and the courts largely stopped: 3,807 convictions in 2020, and just 2,926 in 2021, the lowest figure anywhere in a dataset stretching back to 1986.

Here's the part that gets cherry-picked. Since that 2021 floor, the number has risen every single year: 3,722, then 4,280, then 4,622, and 4,880 in 2025. That is a rise of about 67 percent in four years. Pull out only those four numbers and you can build a very frightening chart.

Pull out the other 35 years and the chart looks entirely different. The 2025 figure of 4,880 is still lower than 2018's 4,938, and lower than every single year from 1986 through 2018. It is 65 percent below the 1989 peak. What the four-year climb mostly looks like, on the face of it, is a court system catching back up after lockdowns emptied its lists, not a city that suddenly went lawless.

The honest counter-argument: convictions are not crime. They measure what police charge and what courts finish, which depends on prosecution resourcing, court backlogs, legislative change and how quickly cases move through. A backlog cleared is a conviction counted, even if the offending happened years earlier. So the post-2021 rise could partly be delayed 2020 and 2021 cases landing late. It's also worth checking whether the 2025 figure covers a complete year on the same basis as earlier ones, because a partial or reclassified year would change the shape of the recent trend. Either way, the size of the long-run fall from 14,008 is far too large to be an artefact of any of that.

My view: if you're going to use conviction counts as a scoreboard for how safe a city is, you have to use the whole scoreboard. The 2021 low was an artificial floor created by a pandemic, and measuring recovery from an artificial floor will always produce impressive percentages. The more useful comparison is 2018, and on that measure Auckland's courts are processing slightly fewer convicted adults now than they were seven years ago.

Ninety-four a week is not nothing. It's also not 269.