Everyone's talking about crime being out of control. Politicians are campaigning on it. News bulletins lead with it. But here's what the Bay of Plenty courts actually recorded in 2024: 233,068 adult convictions. That's the lowest number since 1987.

You have to go back 37 years to find a year when fewer adults were convicted of offences in this region. The last time convictions were this low, David Lange was Prime Minister and the share market had just crashed.

The recent trajectory tells the story. In 2020, there were 246,728 convictions. By 2024, that figure had dropped by more than 13,000. The peak in this five-year window was 2020, right at the start of the pandemic. Since then, convictions have been trending downward.

This doesn't mean crime has vanished. It means fewer people are being convicted. That could reflect changes in policing priorities, court backlogs, diversionary programmes, or actual offending rates. What it definitely means is that the courts are processing fewer convictions than they have in nearly four decades.

The 2024 figure sits below every year in the 2020s so far. It's lower than 2023 (241,384), lower than 2022 (233,324), and well below the 2020 peak. The drop from 2020 to 2024 represents a 5.5% decline in adult convictions across the region.

Context matters here. The Bay of Plenty has grown significantly since 1987. The population is larger, the economy is different, and the justice system has changed. Comparing raw conviction numbers across nearly four decades isn't perfect. But the direction of travel in the last five years is clear: downward.

This is one justice service area, not the whole country. But it's a substantial region covering Tauranga, Rotorua, and surrounding areas. And the pattern here contradicts the narrative that convictions are spiralling upward everywhere.

Politicians will continue to campaign on law and order. That's politics. But the courts in the Bay of Plenty are recording their lowest conviction numbers in 37 years. That's data. (Source: Ministry of Justice, adults-convicted-by-sentence)