Picture the holding cells at Auckland Central, Wellington's Rimutaka Prison, the remand wing at Christchurch Men's. In 2023, those facilities held 12,687 people waiting for trial on robbery, extortion, or related charges. By the end of 2024, that number had dropped to 9,039.

That's 3,648 fewer people. The biggest single-year fall in the dataset. (Source: Stats NZ, remand-prisoners)

To find a year with robbery remand numbers this low, you have to scroll back to 2004. Twenty years ago. Before smartphones, before the Global Financial Crisis, before COVID reshaped everything about how New Zealand operates.

The trajectory makes the drop even starker. Robbery remand numbers climbed steadily from 2020 onwards: 11,571 in 2020, 11,781 in 2021, 11,541 in 2022. Then they jumped to 12,687 in 2023. Then they collapsed by 29% in one year.

This isn't a gradual trend. This is a cliff.

What happened? The data doesn't tell us. It doesn't explain whether police changed their charging practices, whether courts sped up case processing, whether fewer robberies occurred, or whether bail conditions loosened. It just records the outcome: thousands fewer people sitting in remand for robbery offences than the year before.

But here's what matters. When politicians talk about crime, robbery is one of the headline categories. It's visceral. It's personal. It's the stuff of news bulletins and public fear. And right now, by this measure at least, it's at a 20-year low.

The numbers don't fit the narrative. They don't fit the sense that everything's getting worse, that the streets are less safe, that crime is spiralling. The remand data shows the opposite: a sharp, sudden contraction.

You can argue about what caused it. You can debate whether it reflects reality on the ground or just changes in how the system processes cases. But you can't argue with the drop itself. It's the steepest fall on record, and it happened last year.

9,039 people on remand for robbery in 2024. Down from 12,687 the year before. The lowest figure in two decades. That's the number. Make of it what you will.