OnPoint by Keith Ng

To hell in a hell basket

Shocking figures in the DomPost yesterday showed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there are places in New Zealand with more cases of MURDER per capita than any other place in New Zealand.

What’s more, the statistics irrefutably show that this is not only true of MURDER, but also of robbery, assault, rape and cannabisism. Remarkably, in a country that we once thought of as safe, there now exists crime capitals where instances of such crimes per capita is higher than anywhere else in New Zealand.

One of these is Wanganui, the “homicide capital” of New Zealand, where on average 0.93 person per 10,000 people is MURDERED every single year in 2005. As you read this paragraph, 1.77e-6 of a person has just been brutally MURDERED.

But even outside of these lawless crime capitals, no one is safe. In each category of horrible horrible crime that will certainly happen to you and destroy your life, the DomPost has looked for the ten regions with the highest rate per capita. It’s an indictment of modern New Zealand that, without exception, all ten trouble spots were found right here, in Aotearoa. That’s right, gentle, law-abiding readers: If you ranked regions of New Zealand by instances of particular kinds of crime, the top ten most crime ridden regions are, without exception, New Zealand regions.

Why hasn’t the Police Commissioner resigned over this? What is the Prime Minister doing about it? Does she have a plan to ensure that no New Zealand region is the New Zealand region with the highest crime rate? I bet she doesn’t.

Thank god the DomPost released these valuable figures. As they note on their front-page, these are “the statistics you’ve never read about – till now”. And why not? After all, they “show just how dangerous New Zealand is”. Because the police work for Helen’s PC Sisterhood, that’s why. They only “focus on raw numbers and percentage rises or falls”. I mean, what’s an ordinary person supposed to do with bureaucratic mumble-jumble like “actual cases of crime” or whether crime is “increasing” or “decreasing”?

What we really need to know is whether parts of New Zealand has crime rates higher than everywhere else in New Zealand, and this valuable analysis has proven that there are, thus proving that crime is out of control and that we are all going to be brutally MURDERED.

Especially you. Yeah, that’s right, buddy, you.

[Sigh. I suppose we should be thankful because it means that the actual crime figures are so unsensational that the DomPost has to resort to statistical truisms for their fear-mongering. I don’t really understand this obsession, though – do people actually want to read stuff that makes them feel unsafe? Does reading about crime make one feel more prepared against crime? I just don’t get it. I guess that’s why I don’t own my own metropolitan daily.]

[Note: Online version of DomPost article may differ from print version. And in the print version, the have another two pages on victims of crime, proving - beyond a shadow of a doubt - that crime is a bad thing.]