Alexander Marc: General Debate 
Alexander Marc: General Debate 
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MARC ALEXANDER (United Future) 
: 
 I am grateful for the contribution from Ron Mark after the frivolous speeches made by the first two speakers. I too am interested in the area of crime and I would like to pursue that topic. 
The Government has claimed that its tougher approach to crime has meant higher police resolution rates longer sentences and lower crime rates. That is a fiction. It is bollocks. Let us take a look at the crime rates first. It is getting harder to register and report offences. That is a fact. One detective agency in Auckland told me that slam-dunk cases were being ignored—that even after someone made three trips to the police officers still refused to take a complaint. Police do not register any suspect complaints and therefore these are absent from statistics as well. That is something that did not happen before. Police further skew data by calling some offences civil when they should be called criminal—again skewing the statistics and creating a fiction. 
In terms of resolutions the police are increasingly adept at distorting the numbers. Undue pressure has been put on police to record burglary call-outs as resolved even when they attend and find that no burglary has occurred at all thereby inflating the apparent number of solved crimes. Cases such as those where a neighbour might have alerted police to what he or she thought was burglary but turned out to be for example a homeowner fumbling with keys in a lock go into the stats as resolved cases. They look like another burglary solved yet that is completely and utterly untrue. The fact is I have got this information from the police themselves. They tell me what is happening. This Government is utterly out of touch with one of the critical departments responsible for looking after the citizens of this country. 
Police have a code for some of these events. “K1” for example means “police attention sufficient” and “K3” means “no offence disclosed”. Police codes are being misused in the handling of burglary call-outs which are considered to be resolved when in fact no crime might have taken place at all. The denials by the Minister of Police George Hawkins in answers to written questions that these things happen are clearly just the official line. Officers on the street know differently. They are working in a bureaucratic police culture that is massively focused on perceived outcomes to the point that there is dodgy paperwork created to make things look more impressive than they really are all at the expense of law-abiding taxpayers who deserve to know the truth and who deserve to be protected adequately. 
Here is another example: middle-income earners who cannot afford legal aid and who cannot afford lawyers are more inclined just to plead guilty to lower level offences and get a quick clearance. The Government is forcing the police to generate good police stats rather than good policing. What about the much-vaunted Sentencing Act? How is that really working? The reality is that there are more prisoners due to shorter not tougher sentences. Our courts are sending more offenders to prison but many are serving shorter sentences. This is based on figures I have obtained to written questions. 
Since 1994 the overall prison population has increased by 16 percent from 7360 to 8540. But despite claims from the Government that this is due to much tougher sentencing the biggest increase is in sentences of under 3-years in duration. Sentences from 6 months to 12 months in length have increased by 48 percent from 1468 to 2169. Sentences of 1 year to 2 years in duration have increased by 96 percent from 850 to 1646. Sentences of 2 to 3 years’ duration have increased by 87 percent from 298 to 557. It is the waves of prisoners who do a few years or less who have most bolstered the prison population and because of their short sentences they gain next to nothing out of prison-based rehabilitation or skills programmes. They certainly do not get rehabilitated and there is no sense of retribution for the victims. 
Those are just the sentences that are imposed. It says nothing about the prisoners who get out earlier on parole. A census of prison inmates that was carried out in November 2003 showed that only 21 percent of male inmates had no previous sentences 66 percent had more than 10 previous sentences and 16 percent had over 50 previous sentences. We should remember our rehabilitation statistics. Within 5 years 86 percent of offenders go straight back into prison. The higher rate of recidivism suggests that it is the number of prisoners making a return trip to jail after serving a short sentence rather than the imposition of longer sentences that is driving up the prison population. Average sentences from 2002 have gone up by just 6 months. The reason is that the very top end of offenders are definitely getting longer sentences but there are not very many of them. There is only a small handful. Whatever tinkering the police do the reality is that sentences are increasing.