In the 60 months to March 2015, domestic violence, indecent assault, sexual assult, theft from dwelling and fraud increased in New South Wales, while other types of major offences decreased or remained stable.

Summary

In the 24 months to March 2014, only three of the 17 major offences showed significant upward trends. These were:

1. assault – domestic violence related (up 2.2%);
2. indecent assault, act of indecency and other sexual offences (up 3.2 %);
3. sexual assult up (1.6 %);
4. theft from dwelling (2.0%);
5. fraud (up 7.7%).

Ten of the major offences showed significant downward trends:

1. assult - non-domestic (down 5.5%);
2. robbery without a weapon (down 13.2%);
3. robbery with a firearm (down 12.4%);
4. robbery with weapon - not a firearm (down 5.9%)
5. break and enter dwelling (down 4.8%);
6. break and enter non-dwelling (down 6.7%);
7. motor vehicle theft (down 7.0%);
8. steal from motor vehicle (down 1.6%);
9. steal from person (down 8.69%); and
10. malicious damage to property (down 7.4%).

Public willingness to report crime, however, is just one of the extraneous factors which can affect trends in recorded crime. Shifts in policing policy can also have a marked effect on the number of recorded drug offences, cases of offensive behaviour or of receivings to stolen goods. For these offences,therefore, recorded rates probably do not accurately reflect actual rates. For this reason,the more detailed comparisons of crime rates and examination of trends in this document are restricted to offence categories which are more likely to be reported to, rather than detected by police.