About Karen Chhour’s youth offending claims

Written By: - Date published: 11:53 am, February 19th, 2025 - 11 comments
Categories: crime, karen chhour, making shit up, spin, uncategorized, willow-jean prime, you couldn't make this shit up - Tags:

Karen Chhour has been under some pressure in Parliament recently.

Last week Labour’s Willow-Jean Prime asked Chhor some very direct questions about the number of young people who had attended the Government’s youth boot camp who were back in custody or who had reoffended. Chhour refused to answer these questions.

In response to a question suggesting that the Military Style Academy policy was a complete waste of time she accused Labour of “drag[ging] these young people through the mud with venom”.

This was quite a weird statement. Asking about how many young people had reoffended was a perfectly acceptable question, especially given that Boot Camps had been offered up as a panacea for serious youth offending. When you have claimed a policy will solve serious youth offending then how well it actually works is something our elected representatives should be able to ask about.

Chhour then said this:

What I would say is evidence tells us that what we were doing was not working. Evidence tells us that youth crime was at an all-time high, and something needed to happen.

Is youth crime at an all time high?

The statistics would suggest not.

This is a graph taken from Justice’s publication Youth Justice Indicators Summary Report.

You can see clearly that the long term trend has been downward and has more recently flattened out. There was a slight increase post covid but otherwise the trend has been downward.

So yesterday Chhour had to come back into Parliament and correct her answer.

She said this:

On 13 February 2025, in response to the supplementary questions in oral question No. 9, I stated that “Evidence tells us that youth crime was at an all-time high,”. What I should have said is that in relation to serious and persistent youth offending—which I understood was the context of the questioning—the increase was at an all-time high. This is according to the Ministry of Justice’s latest youth justice indicators report, which has data back to 2013-14.

Is serious and persistent youth offending at an all time high?

Here is another graph from the document Chhour referred to:

The report said:

The number of children with serious and persistent offending behaviour decreased by 8% (187 children), while the number of young people with serious and persistent offending behaviour was similar to last year (886 young people). Relative to the population, the rate decreased by 10% and 3% for children and young people, respectively.

Chhour’s quote referred to the increase in offending. Maybe serious and youth offenders did commit more offences. But the report that Chhour relied on does not reflect this.

Maybe Chhour will need to soon make a personal explanation to amend a statement made in a personal explanation.

It would help if she made statements based in reality. The Youth Justice System works well, youth crime and recidivism rates have been dropping over an extended period of time.

There are a bunch of really tough kids with multiple problems and who are suffering the scourge of poverty and colonialism. We do need to do our best to turn their lives around. Dressing them up in soldier’s uniforms and making them march around will not solve their problems.

11 comments on “About Karen Chhour’s youth offending claims ”

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  1. Tiger Mountain 1
    19 February 2025 at 12:24 pm

    Another rather tragic token MP–if she were gifted a brain it might be lonely. Politics is not for everyone, it requires mental agility and quite a skill set to do well at and hang in there for any period–as the current Prime Minister also demonstrates.

    The other thing seems obvious–misleading the public…

    • Drowsy M. Kram 1.1
      19 February 2025 at 12:36 pm

      if she were gifted a brain it might be lonely

      laugh “If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”

    • tc 1.2
      20 February 2025 at 10:15 am

      Karens a shining example of our owned media along with Costello.

      Competency and integrity issues abound yet gets a free ride that you would never see a minister from the opposition parties get if it was them.

      • Incognito 1.2.1
        20 February 2025 at 11:09 am

        In my view, the fact-checking, scrutinising of evidence and reasoning (if any), challenging of conclusions, and criticism of decisions (e.g., in the form of policies, regulations, Bills, etc.) should all start in the debating chamber in the House of Representatives.

  2. Mountain Tui 2
    19 February 2025 at 1:17 pm

    She's a disgrace, and Luxon is a failure.

    Just waiting for him to get rolled.

  3. Stephen D 3
    19 February 2025 at 1:41 pm

    The next coalition negotiations must include a clause regarding who has the authority to dismiss a minister. It must be the PM, as coalitions party leaders can’t/won’t.

  4. Incognito 4
    19 February 2025 at 1:53 pm

    The only reason Karen Chhour got her temporary position of power is that she successfully completed her ideological cult’s brainwash & conditioning programme that guarantees that she will only propose simplistic solutions that address the diagnosis but never the underlying cause – facts never matter, as they’re inconvenient truths to be ignored or twisted to suit the cult’s narratives.

    • Macro 4.1
      19 February 2025 at 3:45 pm

      For them – only alternative facts matter.

      • Anne 4.1.1
        19 February 2025 at 5:14 pm

        Yes, but what they have been very successful at doing is convincing sufficient people that their alternate facts do matter. The fact is, these alternate facts are not facts but they have been generated by a fact-free political cult which chooses to create it's own facts in order to divert attention away from the real facts which they wish to dilute in their quest fot political dominance and the money and power that goes with it.

        A fact -free society is an easily manipulated society.

        The long and the short of it all. 😉

  5. tWig 5
    19 February 2025 at 2:12 pm

    At BHN Tamatha Paul, Green MP, discusses her development of a functional alternative for the Nats'' bootcamp' mentality. Great ideas from her. State care being state CARING, from prenatal onwards.

    She discusses the problem of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, which is not counted as a disability in NZ, with those affected often ending up in the prison system. The Childrens' Commissioner told the government 2 weeks the youth justice legislation they are bringing in is unjust, unsupported by evidence and should not be continue. Paul says the government is hammering this as a tough on crime initiative.

    Well worth the listen.

  6. Georgecom 6
    19 February 2025 at 7:27 pm

    Karen is a chore, getting correct info from her certainly is. Youth crime may be on the rise now yes Karen, as unemployment goes up. If boot camps are successful and the solution you would certainly want to show how successful they are, so why the secrecy?