Crime spike ‘no surprise’

The number of crime incidents in Counties Manukau rose by more than five time the national average in the five years to 2013, while the number of ‘‘alarm sounding’’ incidents spiked 10 times faster than the national average.

But police say this is unsurprising given the hundreds of extra officers, a focus on prevention, and higher level of alarm users in the district.

An internal police report in 2012 showed that hundreds of burglaries were wrongly reclassified as incidents, which are not counted in official recorded crime statistics. From mid-2010, officers changed between 11 and 26 burglaries to incidents every month, many of them to ‘‘alarm sounding’’.

After the revelations, police said there were no issues with burglary statistics in any other police areas. But when the recoding rates for burglaries across all districts were asked for, police said they did not notified of the investigation by email in August 2012. “The recoding of burglary offences to non-burglary offence codes appears significant over those years and is believed to have led to a false report of a reduction in burglary offences,” the email said.

Then Police Commissioner Peter Marshall immediately asked a numkeep these numbers.

Police released the number of recorded incidents across each police district, which rose 6.6 per cent nationally from 2008/09 to 2012/13. In Counties Manukau the increase was 36.5 per cent.

Nationally the number of ‘‘alarm sounding’' incidents rose by 9 per cent over the same period. In Counties Manukau they almost doubled from 861 in 2008/09 to 1655 in 2012/13 — a 92 per cent rise.

There were also sharp increases in Counties Manukau of ‘‘traffic incident’’ (up 68 per cent), ‘‘bail breach’’ (up 198 per cent), and ‘‘attempted suicide’’ (up 221 per cent).

Counties Manukau Superintendent John Tims said the increase in incidents was due to a focus on prevention, as well as the increase in officers from 754 in November 2008 to 1068 by the end of 2010. He said no investigation was needed. — Derek Cheng ber of follow-up questions, and he and Mr Bush were told in response that no other crime types were reviewed. They were also told that a national review had showed that recoding rates were “fairly consistent with each other, except one Wellington area shown to be higher than the average”.