(File image) Photo: Richard Tindiller
Police still have no reliable way of recording who is being targeted by hate crimes, despite funding a dedicated team and hundreds of audits in the last year.
It comes three years after New Zealand's deadliest hate crime, the Christchurch mosque terrorist attack where 51 people were killed.
But despite the country's terrorism threat level jumping to high in 2019, police still could not accurately record hate crimes.
Police said any hate or prejudice offence, such as a death threat, was flagged as a hate crime.
But at the same time, in an email, they said their information was not accurate enough to quantify hate crime based on targeted groups.
"This data is not yet of sufficient quality to rely on, or to report under the National Recording Standards."
That was despite police saying, in their annual report on data quality for the year ending June 2021, that they had improved accuracy in identifying hate crimes.
It also showed they set up a dedicated team in May 2021 and they did hundreds of audits on different hate crimes and risks.
However, when RNZ asked how many hate crimes and death threats they had recorded towards Māori and the rainbow community, they could not say.
Hiria Te Rangi is one of many who has received multiple death threats for carrying moko kauae and being wahine Māori.
After making a LinkedIn post when she ran for president of Internet NZ, she received an email saying this:
"'You're lucky I'm not in Gisborne, I will come and bash your head in. You think you know what you're talking about, you don't'. You stop kinda reading after that and all you see is the swearing and telling you 'you're worthless ... you deserve a bullet'."
She did not go to police about the threats, Te Rangi said.
"If I told the police, they'd tell me to go to Netsafe. Netsafe at the time makes you relive the trauma and you have to absolutely prove that the trauma occurred. Police couldn't do anything about it, because I don't think that they're very good at stuff like this," she said.
Hate crimes such as the threat Te Rangi received were not a standalone offence, meaning there was still no way to measure how widespread hate crimes were towards targeted groups like Māori.
Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon said Aotearoa was behind other countries that could record this data.
"I am concerned because there's enough examples overseas where hate crime is collected and there are processes and formulas and interpretations. I know in England, Australia and Canada, they do collect hate crime [data]," Foon said.
Police are currently 15 months into their four-year funded programme, Te Raranga, to help improve their response to hate crime.
But police have only started training with tools to help detect it since July 2022.
Foon was frustrated at the lack of the action.
"We get around about 100 complaints through the info line a week."
RNZ approached police for comment but they would not answer specific questions.
RNZ also requested the latest copy of this year's annual data police report through an Official Information Act (OIA), but police said it would not be released until 17 November.
