What is being counted
The headline series is youth proceeded against by Police: unique people aged 10–19 with at least one recorded proceeding in the year (warning, alternative action, or prosecution). That is not the same as recorded offences, charges in Youth Court, or convictions.
Age bands follow the youth-justice split used in New Zealand practice: children 10–13, young people 14–16, and 17–19 (17-year-olds moved into the youth jurisdiction from 2019; 18–19 remain in the adult courts). Mixing those legal categories is a limitation we flag rather than hide.
How ethnicity is recorded
NZ Police generally record a single (unique) ethnicity, with Māori taking priority when more than one group is identified. Stats NZ population figures use total response: a person who is Māori and European is counted in both groups, so population shares can add to more than 100%. We normalise the published total-response mix so the dashboard bars sum to 100%. That makes the chart readable, and it slightly inflates or deflates groups relative to raw census output.
Over-representation is crime share ÷ population share. A ratio of 2.5× means the group’s share of youth proceedings is two and a half times its share of 10–19-year-olds. It is not a claim about individual propensity, policing intensity, reporting, or socio-economic mix. Those are separate questions the raw table cannot answer.
Clearance / unsolved
“Unsolved” is 100% minus the published or compiled clearance rate for the offence group. Clearance is an administrative outcome, not a court finding of guilt. Files can be uncleared because there is no identified offender, because evidence is insufficient, or because the victim withdraws. Ethnicity of unsolved files is often unknown; the ethnicity chart on the clearance page is therefore limited to proceedings that already have an identified person.
Regions
District rates use Police district boundaries and a 10–19 population denominator compiled from Stats NZ subnational estimates. The map is a schematic of those twelve districts, not LINZ parcel data.
What this site is not
It is not a charging document, not a league table of communities, and not a substitute for the source tables. When official agencies revise a year, this dashboard should be treated as a snapshot. Download the CSV on each page if you want to reuse the compiled numbers with that caveat attached.