What I find a bit strange is that there's a number of people making claims about crime levels, yet they're all basing their claims on personal experience, and seemingly haven't thought to check if there were statistics available online. Just searching for (sans quotes) "new zealand crime statistics" these were among the first few results:
New Zealand's government isn't required to report accurate statistics.
There was a controversial interview about this in the last couple of years. One side was arguing 'what's the point in transparency? It is just going to scare people of moving to places that we are trying to rebuild.'
Get to the ground level in NZ. Walk through Christchurch at night. You have a good chance of a bad encounter, unless you're a stacked dude with quite a bit of muscle on you.
> New Zealand's government isn't required to report accurate statistics.
"isn't required" tells me nothing of how accurate the statistics are.
> Get to the ground level in NZ. Walk through Christchurch at night.
this isn't going to give an accurate picture of what crime levels are in general there or any other place in New Zealand.
Anyway, I have no stake in any of this - I'm not one of the people in this thread who were making any claims about the levels of crime (whether low, medium or high) in NZ.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_Zealand#Statistic...
http://www.police.govt.nz/about-us/publications/statistics