gzt: 
The claims of higher youth crime are an outright falsehood as far as I can work out.

LOL! Of course the numbers of youths facing charges are dropping when they are not being caught by a viciously understaffed police force and the fact that when they are caught they get a slap on the wrist. Only 37% of ram raid cases charged in the last 12 months...  I mean look at the woeful fleeing driver policy!

Just to prove a point, how about we look at the number of incidents caused by youths..?

"The scale of the spike in ram raids has been laid out in internal police documents obtained by Newshub.

In the first six months of this year, there have been 254 ramraids - that's a 518 percent increase on the first six months of 2018.

A police report analysing a year of ram raids found 76 percent were committed by youths under 17 years old and 17 percent were under 13 years old. From cars barging into malls, a 7-tonne digger ploughing into a petrol station, to liquor shop owners arming themselves, ram raids have been on the rise.

To find out why, police compiled a year's worth of data until the end of October last year. Obtained by Newshub, the report found that of the 283 ram raids, police had identified offenders in 42 percent of the cases and enforcement action was taken in 37 percent.

Thirty-eight repeat offenders were responsible for about a quarter of the ram-raids and almost one in five of the offenders were under 13.

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2022/07/documents-revealed-518-percent-increase-in-ram-raids-one-in-five-offenders-under-13.html