A new seven-officer team will start in West Auckland in the next few weeks. File photo. Photo:
An Auckland councillor is hoping a new police beat team in Henderson will help bring crime down rates in the area.
The government has announced a new seven-officer team will start in the West Auckland area in the next few weeks.
They would join the 63 beat patrol officers deployed around the country since funding was received in Budget 2024.
Waitākere Ward councillor Shane Henderson said the new officers' presence was needed.
"I'm delighted with the news. I think the community at large, and especially the business community, are really excited about this initiative, because it's going to allow us to have increased perceptions of safety,"
According to the Police Crime Snapshot, between July 2024 and July 2025 there were 2443 victimisations in Henderson South.
The vast majority of these were thefts, making up 2073. There were also 181 burglaries, 152 assaults, 27 categorised as robbery, blackmail, and extortion, eight sexual offences, and two marked as 'harm or endanger persons.'
There were also 1081 total victimisations in Henderson North, and 62 in Henderson West.
"Henderson is struggling at the moment, and we're still kind of trying to recover our local economy," Henderson said.
"Unemployment's starting to bite again, people are doing it really tough with the cost of living here in West Auckland, then that's the sort thing that comes downstream from that."
He said it could work as a wraparound approach, as officers also helped people into housing services and food banks.
Assistant Police Commissioner, Mike Johnson told Morning Report the new beat teams were proving to be successful at reducing crime in the areas they were deployed.
Johnson said the teams were providing on the ground insight into problem areas as well as reassuring local businesses and building trust in communities.
"Things like burglaries and thefts and street level assaults. If I take the Auckland example, we've had a 10 percent reduction in those types of crimes since the beat teams started."
Earlier Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith told RNZ the government's shift in focus from lowering prison numbers to reducing victims of violent crime was beginning to have an effect.
He said the beat teams as well as gang patch laws, tougher sentencing and improvements in prisoner rehabilitation were all combining to push back at the levels of crime across the country.
'If it's just shifting around police, it's not helping'
Labour agreed that people felt safer when there were more police officers, but is questioning where the new beat officers are going to come from.
"If it's just shifting around police, it's not helping. This government promised 500 more police officers and so far they've only got 23 of those," said Labour's police spokesperson Ginny Andersen.
The latest New Zealand Crime and Victims Survey, which tracked the 12 months to May 2025, showed a decrease of 1000 victims of violent crime from the February update.
All up, there were 156,000 victims in the 12 months to May, 23,000 fewer than when the government took power.
Andersen expressed concern at the increase of sexual assault victims in the latest figures, which showed 3000 more victims between the February (75,000) and May (78,000) updates, a 5 percent increase.
While the number of victims of family violence had decreased by 13 percent between the February and May 2025 updates, or 8 percent between October 2023 and May 2025, Andersen remained worried it was because of a reduction in callouts, and therefore less reporting.
Andersen has previously claimed police had stepped away from attending family violence callouts.
"The single biggest reason that family violence or sexual assaults are not reported is because someone has reached out for help and they've not received that. And there is a real concern with the position this government has taken that they are driving reporting rates down and not giving people the help they need when they need it," she said.
"The single biggest driver of crime when I was in government was family violence. We need to understand more clearly from this government how much that decrease in victimisations is coming from family violence."
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