Crime figures were released by NZ police yesterday claiming a 9.2% rise in violent crime driven primarily by an 18.6% reported increase in domestic violence. Yesterday was April Fools Day and it’s sad that we, the NZ public, are being taken for fools concerning such an important social issue.

To her credit, Police Minister Judith Collins (isn’t it so heart-warmingly politically correct for a government to appoint a female to this role?) spoke about domestic violence in gender-neutral terms, and she also pointed to the likely role in the new statistics of increased “reporting” (stimulated by extensive, expensive and sexist domestic violence campaigns that have entertained us for some years now). Of course, it’s a lot more than just increased “reporting”. Those campaigns extended the definition of family violence to cover most ways that men tend to respond to provocation, and a good proportion of the increase in calls to police will have resulted from a “reds under the beds” mentality in which complainants perceived threat or violence in normal, harmless expressions of feelings, opinions or dissatisfactions especially by men.

The real misrepresentation is evident when one notes the definition of “recorded offences” used by the police to generate their figures:

“A recorded offence is defined as one in which an offender is identified by police and dealt with by, for example, being warned, arrested or prosecuted.”

This definition is applied in a context of indoctrination of police by feminist propaganda, mandatory arrest policies in domestic violence call-outs and the ability given to police a few years ago to prosecute people in the absence of any complainant or complainant’s evidence. So what is actually happening is that police are called to “domestic incidents” many of which are simply heated arguments that neighbours feel inconvenienced by so call police, or in which one party uses police as a way to dominate the other in the dispute. The police “identify an offender”, i.e. nearly always the man regardless of what actually happened, and warn him or worse. Hey presto, we have another domestic violence “offence” even though no law was broken and certainly not proven to have been broken.

This creative accounting of DV will also explain the record high “resolution” rate that police claim they achieved. Many of the extra “resolutions” simply consisted of attending a domestic call-out, arbitrarily identifying a man and carrying out a form of immediate vigilante justice against him in the form of a warning often accompanied by pressure on him to leave his home for a time. Hey presto, we have another resolution.

That is not to say that violent crime isn’t increasing in our society. Murder and homicide figures show huge increases and it is difficult to falsify the reality of dead bodies. The most surprising thing is that no reported commentators have considered the likely role that removal of corporal punishment in schools may have had in the steady rise in antisocial behaviour since then. Or that government recently pushed that same failed ideology into our homes still claiming “if we only stop using physical force in disciplining our children, they won’t learn to be violent”. Yeah right.

And one would expect that rates of violence within our families will increase in line with rates of violence in our society generally. But the police statistics are largely fraudulent and it is no credit to the integrity (or perhaps simply the intelligence) of those many politicians and others who commented on the police statistics as if they provided an accurate description of family violence. Those commentators have simply bought into police’s contribution to the huge fraud that is the domestic violence industry, an industry that police of course are a part of.