Somewhere in New Zealand last year, a judge handed down a community sentence. The defendant left court with conditions to follow, probably community work or supervision. Stats NZ recorded it in the official dataset.

But here's what didn't get recorded: what the person actually did. The offence category? Listed as 'inadequate data available.'

That happened 5,610 times in 2024. That's not a rounding error. That's more people than live in Whakatāne. That's eighteen times higher than the 309 cases recorded in 2018, and sixty times higher than the 90 cases in 2019.

We've gone from a minor data quirk to a systemic blind spot in less than six years.

Community sentences are supposed to be transparent. They're alternatives to prison, ways to hold people accountable while keeping them in society. The public has a right to know what offences lead to them. Researchers need this data to understand what works. Policymakers rely on it to spot trends.

Instead, we're watching the dataset deteriorate in real time. Between 2018 and 2024, the number of community sentences with no recorded offence increased 1,715%. The 2022 figure was already alarming at 1,977 cases. Two years later, it's nearly tripled again.

This isn't about privacy or protecting identities. Every other community sentence in the system manages to record an offence category without compromising anyone. Drug offences, traffic violations, property crime. they all get logged. But thousands don't.

The courts are still functioning. Judges are still sentencing. The problem is happening somewhere between the courtroom and the database. Maybe it's a software issue. Maybe it's understaffing. Maybe different courts are using different recording systems and the data can't be reconciled. Whatever the cause, it's getting worse, not better.

Here's what we do know: 2024 marked the worst data gap in at least 25 years. You'd have to go back to 1999 to find anything comparable, and even that's uncertain because the recording systems were different then.

When crime statistics dominate headlines and drive policy debates, this kind of data decay matters. We can't have informed conversations about criminal justice when thousands of sentences are vanishing into a category called 'inadequate data available.'

Five thousand people walked out of court with community sentences last year. We just don't know what they were sentenced for. And the number keeps climbing.

(Source: Stats NZ, community-sentences)