Common assault in New Zealand

Offence: refers to any act or omission by a person/organisation or persons/organisations for which a penalty could be imposed by the New Zealand legal system. Offences in this collection are defined by the 2023 edition of the Australian and New Zealand Standard Offence Classification (ANZSOC).
Victimisation: the measure involving counting a person, organisation or premises once within each criminal incident for each ANZSOC Division in which they are recorded as being a victim of an offence. ‘Victimisations’ count each instance of a person, organisation or premises being victimised for one or more offences.

Please note the charts on Figure.NZ exclude victimisations whose outcome of investigation was 'No crime'.

http://www.police.govt.nz/sites/default/files/publications/nz_recorded_crime_victims_manual_v1.2.pdf

Caution should be observed when making inferences about long-term trends in crime, particularly for types of offences that are known to be significantly under-reported (e.g. Sexual offences and minor offences not warranting insurance claims or medical treatment).

The NZ RCVS collection includes:
- substantive offences (e.g. robbery, assault);
- attempted offences (e.g. attempted robbery).

The scope of the NZ RCVS collection excludes the following offences:
- offences that Police are able to deal with by issuing an infringement notice;
- offences that come under the authority of agencies other than NZ Police, such as Customs, Worksafe New Zealand, Inland Revenue, ACC, Ministry for Primary Industries, etc.;
- offences that do not generally have specific identifiable victims (e.g. drugs offences, public order offences);
- conspiracy offences;
- aid and abet offences.

Offences whose outcome was 'No Crime' were also excluded to match the figures as per NZ Police dashboard.

At URL provided, select the 'Download' tab. Then select the period Jan 2021 to Feb 2026 on the slider and '5 Age Sex Boundary' at the bottom of the page.
Click on the 'Download' button in the bottom-right corner and then 'Data'.
A new page will open. Select the 'Full data' tab, tick the 'Show all columns' checkbox and select the 'Download all rows as a text file' hyperlink.

Due to the size of the file, Figure.NZ created summary pivot tables in Excel to be able to process aggregated figures. Instructions to replicate the pivot tables are explained in the downloadable file below.

This dataset presents descriptive information about victims of crime in New Zealand. It also gives an overview of crime trends. These are victimisations reported during a relevant period.

Data in the NZ RCVS collection relate to offences recorded by NZ Police as prescribed in the NZ Police National Recording Standard (NRS), where the matter came to Police attention (File Reported Date) on or after 1 July 2014.