Criminal activity at hot spots skews City stats

Opportunist thieves and career criminals, who've become adept at finding the hot locations to target vehicles with valuables in them, accounted for 1, 300 of the 4,220 more offences in Auckland City District in 2011 than there were in the calendar year 2010.

At a total of 55,220 recorded offences in 2011, the district's crime rate is up on the 2010 figure of nearly 51,000 offences but still down on the 2009 total of 56,596 offences.

Percentage wise, recorded crime in the district went up on the 2010 figure by 8.3 percent, much of which can generally be attributed to more public order offences and thefts from cars.

"It is frustrating to see an increase of more than1,000 offences in relation to thefts from cars - 9798 in 2011 and 8493 in 2010," District Commander, Superintendent Mike Clement, said.

"The simple reality is that if property is not left in vehicles in view of opportunist thieves, the opportunities for offenders to commit this crime type are severely restricted.

"It is most unfortunate that victims are only reminded of this fact when they find their vehicles have been broken into."

Public order offences increased by 15.3 per cent, due largely to liquor ban breaches, where nearly 1000 more offences were detected in 2011 than in 2010. Half of this increase was observed over the Rugby World Cup months of September/October.

"There were more Police in the city at this time and they were more able to proactively enforce the various liquor bans so as to contribute to the prevention and minimisation of the harm caused by alcohol-related offending," Mr Clement said.

"However, within this Public Order Offences grouping, disorderly and offensive conduct offences actually dropped by 5.5 per cent and 43 percent respectively."

Other significant crime types declined markedly. Homicide and related offences were down by 36.4 percent with murders down from eight in 2010 to five in 2011.

Harassment and threatening behaviour dropped by nearly 10 per cent, the number of recorded fraud offences fell by 27.5 per cent and offences against Justice/Government Security/Government Operations dropped by 8.9 per cent.