Analysis: 2000 to 2019 (Official Data) and International Comparison

The period 2000 to 2019 is the focus of this chapter. This chapter makes use of a variety of contemporary New Zealand Police/Ngā Pirihimana o Aotearoa reports, reviews and statistical data tracking documents to describe the lethal risks environment being faced by police officers in the first 20 years of the twenty-first century. It revealed a continued decline in the number of officers killed or seriously injured “per 100 officers (75%)”, while the number increased for the “per 100,000 citizens” (Comparison of the data from 1886 to 1999 and 2000 to 2019 was challenging as they came from a wide variety of sources and were not consistently gathered “like for like”. The use of definitions applied by police was also problematic. This caveat needs to be borne in mind when considering this data). This chapter also updates the Lethal Risk Hierarchy developed in Chap. 6 to reflect the situation faced as of 2019. The data analysis also included an international comparison of deaths of police officers in eight countries, across 11 different jurisdictions. This showed Aotearoa New Zealand sitting in second highest place (tied with one other country) for the number of officers killed “per 100,000 citizens”, and second highest place (tied with two other jurisdictions) for officers killed “per 100 officers”.