Understanding NZ’s killers

The Homicide Report, a major Stuff investigation, has obtained new police data that reveals the types of people who kill. The project, launched in May last year, centres around the country’s only publicly searchable database of homicides. It aims to provide the public with a greater insight into the issue of homicide, using victim data obtained from police under the Official Information Act.

We’ve added depth to the police data by pulling details from hundreds of coronial findings, court documents and news stories from Stuff’s archives.

When it first launched, The Homicide Report focused on several themes – women are most likely to die at the hands of a partner or ex, every eighth victim is aged 14 and under, deprived neighbourhoods bear the biggest burden, alcohol is a factor in one third of homicides and gun homicides are usually committed by guns not touched by recent law reform.

Since then we’ve continued to update the database and, in January, obtained a new tranche of police data revealing the age, ethnicity, gender and violent histories of people charged with homicide offences. The Homicide Report database now encompasses 1125 people – 301 women, 627 men and 197 young people – killed between January 2004 and December 31, 2019.

Over the next six days, The Homicide Report will put 2019’s homicide statistics into context, look closely at intimate partner violence, examine why 18-year-old men are the country’s most prevalent killers, highlight a potential new law that could bring relief to dozens of families who’ve lost people to killers deemed insane, and reveal new information about one of the country’s most infamous cold cases.

The Homicide Report is an extension of Stuff’s award-winning Faces of Innocents project, an investigation into child abuse, neglect and maltreatment in New Zealand.

While working on Faces of Innocents, which was first launched in 2015, we learned the police maintained a database of all homicides.

Since September 2017 the police have supplied us with details of more than 1200 homicides.

Homicide is defined as the act of one person killing another. We’ve therefore included police shootings, hunting deaths and cases where people were found to have acted in self-defence.

We’ve also included car crash cases where police charged the driver with murder or manslaughter. Incidents where a child died as a result of being left in an unsafe sleeping environment have been omitted.

Why start at 2004? Police say their data is incomplete before that date.

In September 2019, Stuff requested additional data from police about people charged with homicide offences in New Zealand – their age, ethnicity, criminal history, home address and occupation at the time of the offence. That information was supplied in part in January. Police were unable to provide the occupation or address of an individual at a historical point in time without manually searching each case, which they said was not feasible.

Our investigation was inspired by an LA Times project bearing the same name.

We’ve added depth to the police data by pulling details from hundreds of coronial findings, court documents and news stories from Stuff ’s archives.