Over the weekend urban cyclist, pannier bag and lamb chop recipe aficionado, Russell Brown, decided to enter into the debate about crime on his Twitter feed. He rather gloatingly declared victory over his detractors and published this tweet:

A keen observer will note that Russell Brown is only publishing nine months of data, not 12 months, in declaring what can only really be called premature victory. Let’s, you know, compare like with like. Here is August 2020 until July 2021, 12 months of crime data:

After the lockdowns of 2019 and 2020, there is an understandable rise in reported crimes. If you lock the people down and flood the land with cops looking for people who shouldn’t be out, it doesn’t take a genius to know why reported crime goes down! Except those figures from 2019-2020 show negligible drops in crime, and an alarming increase in assaults.

But let’s now look at 2021-2022 compared to 2020-2021:

That is quite a bit different from the dishonest take of Russell Brown. Worse for him, too, is that the very things he says have gone down, thefts and burglaries, have actually gone up by a significant margin. There are negligible declines in assaults, sexual assaults, abductions and robberies. The massive increases are in burglaries (up 3895) and thefts (up 6184).

Russell Brown, in a rush to protect his precious Labour party from accusations that crime is out of control in Auckland, has merely highlighted his inherent dishonesty. This is probably why he is a criminal-friendly journalist.

This journalist thinks that Russell Brown the journalist should actually be honest with his takes on crime rather than arrogantly assume he’s always right. Now, I’ll cede the floor to him if he wishes to debate the merits of pannier bags vs backpacks, or which of his mother’s recipes for lamb chops is better than the others, but when it comes to looking at raw data from Police, he is either deliberately dishonest or just too stupid to know any better.

I have no doubt that Russell Brown will seriously suggest that the perfect way to keep stats like this down would be to initiate long-term lockdowns to really clamp down on crime. Then again, perhaps he is simply just an idiot.

While Russell Brown might be done arguing with fools, as an avowed atheist perhaps he might like to seek some wisdom from the Bible as written in Proverbs 26:4:

Answer not a fool according to his folly,
    lest you be like him yourself.

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As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news,...