Waikato bears brunt of ramraids, police data shows

New data on ramraids shows Waikato leads the country in the crime.

Police didn’t previously count ramraids separately in their reporting system, with terms such as ‘commercial burglary’ more commonly used, leading to confusion over the scale of the problem.

But two data sets released yesterday paint the most complete picture so far of the offending that’s impacted scores of dairies and other shops over the past two years.

A Waikato liquor store owner wasn’t surprised to see his region out in front but felt ramraids were being replaced by aggravated robberies – and they’re more frightening.

There were 295 ramraids recorded in 2021, according to data based on reviews of incident reports containing common ramraid descriptors.

Waikato police district led the country with 73 for the year, with Auckland on 56 and Bay of Plenty on 47. In contrast, Tasman recorded none.

In 2022, Waikato again led with 111 incidents, with Auckland on 89 and Counties/Manukau on 88 close behind. There were 519 ramraids nationally that year.

Some monthly data doesn’t add up, which police said reflected the categorisation of some crimes changing as investigations progressed.

Generally, the data backs up the police contention that ramraid numbers dropped off after peaking in May 2022, when there were 68 nationally.

Over the entire 26 months recorded, ramraids averaged out to just under one every four days.

But data also shows massive disparities between areas.

For example, Wellington had four ram raids between November 2020 and October 2021, whereas Waikato had 76, according to an Official Information Act response in the release.

The second dataset records how many retail and commercial locations have been ramraided. This is used to work out which shops might be eligible for fog cannons and the like through the Government’s Retail Crime Prevention Programme.

Premises classified as ‘shop’ made up half of the 2053 incidents recorded since 2017.

Police said, as of March 29, that 2352 security interventions had been approved, with 810 completed so far.

Their National Retail Investigation Support Unit had laid 1000 retail crime charges against 178 offenders in under a year.

Ash Parmar, who has a Bottle-O in Huntly and Ngāruawāhia, said he wasn’t surprised by the data. With his friends, family and industry colleagues being targeted, he was well aware of how bad it was.

The data showed ramraids were decreasing, but Parmar said they were being replaced by aggravated robberies – that were much more frightening.

While ramraids caused more damage, the aggravated robberies resulted in injuries.

He said stores hit by ramraids had installed bollards, removing the easy targets, whereas offenders could walk into a store with a weapon with ease.